Ed Harris in the control room double feature

With the projector still set up in the garage for the Oscars yesterday morning on Labour Day, I decided to make use of it with two more movies. Which is actually a lot less than I would usually watch, but this is one three-day weekend where we didn't get the projector set up until the final of the three days, in part due to my wife's preference for watching Spaceman together on Saturday night in the living room rather than on the projector. (It's been the hottest three days of the summer, even though it is now autumn. And even though the garage is the coolest place in our house if all else is equal, it doesn't stand a chance against an air conditioned living room.)

One of the movies was one that my son and I started the day before, watching only half of it. The other was a classic from the 1990s that I've seen only once.

Both had Ed Harris occupying a position of dominance in the command center for a project involving the coordinated efforts of thousands of people. 

If I had been looking for a true thematic double feature for Apollo 13, I might have gone with Space Cowboys, which I have never seen and which was one of the "if you liked this, you'll like this" offerings from Stan after Ron Howard's film had finished. But in the time we paused to have dinner and usual nightly chores, I decided I wanted to fish for a previously seen film that I hadn't seen recently -- and The Truman Show, which I only saw that one time in the theater, was a good match.

First how we got on to Apollo 13, which is my #57 film on Flickchart but which my records tell me I haven't watched since before 2006. 

A few weeks ago, my ten-year-old started telling me what he had learned about the doomed Apollo 13 mission, possibly collected from YouTube. (Hey, maybe if YouTube is educating our children on NASA, it isn't all bad.) Of course my mind immediately went to one of the five 1995 best picture nominees, which had such an impact on me the last time I saw it -- which was probably the second time overall -- that it rocketed up (no pun intended) into the stratosphere (pun intended this time) of my Flickchart, where it regularly beats films you'd think I might like more. Probably a good time to test my loyalty to it.

I did wonder if it would be over the head of my son, but he was the one who was telling me about little things they had to do aboard the ship in order to save it (and themselves) from becoming space junk. Plus, he's pretty advanced for his age, and an interest in space exploration seems like the sort of old-school ambition I'd like to nourish in my children.

I then wondered briefly, given that it is obviously a film intended for adult viewers, whether there would be any language that I wouldn't want him to hear, understanding that he has heard it all before -- just maybe not in films sanctioned by me. I didn't think so, and true enough, there was only the "mild coarse language" promised in the trigger warnings at the beginning. (He asked me why it didn't say "mild curse language," allowing me to define "coarse" for him and explain that "curse" is a noun rather than an adjective.)

What I didn't properly calculate, in a movie all about calculations, is that this is still a ten-year-old and many of the concepts being discussed would be way over his head. Many of the concepts are way over the head of even a 50-year-old.

I'm sure this contributed to the fact that we watched only 55 minutes of a 2 hour and 20 minute movie on Sunday afternoon, when finishing it off would have taken until about 8:20. Even in the air conditioned living room for this portion of the film, I was still secretly grateful that I properly interpreted his squirming and asked him if he wanted to continue the next day. With the heat and with us having gone to the beach earlier, I was all too eager to curl up with one of my late afternoon cat naps.

My son is at an age where he never wants to disappoint his daddy, so he elected to continue on Monday, even though I'm sure his various soccer games on his Nintendo switch and YouTube soccer videos on his tablet held more sway over him than the near-fatal misadventures of Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert. (The first two of whom are still alive, I was pleased to see on Wikipedia after the film ended.) So we continued watching on Monday, this time in the garage on the projector, and this time with about the same amount of squirming, but only slightly more than half the movie to go.

In the end he said he liked it, and he did make a couple spontaneous comments along the way that proved his investment. However, he admitted that he didn't understand most of what was happening. I suppose the question is with a film like Apollo 13, is it important to understand exactly why their current crisis endangers their lives, or do you just need to know that they need to think quickly in order to save themselves? For me, I benefit from a pretty good understanding of the former, which makes the latter all the more tense. For my son, maybe it didn't quite reach that level.

I also think it is probably interesting for a child to watch a movie whose outcome they already know. He knew right from reporting to me the basic details of the Apollo 13 mission that they survived, otherwise he'd be talking about a morbid space tragedy and that's not the sort of thing that tickles the intellect of this particular kid. I tried to address the issue by saying that I thought the movie was incredibly successful and that the proof of this is that you feel tense and excited even though you know the astronauts made it back safely. Again possibly in an attempt to say what I wanted to hear, he co-signed this, albeit somewhat unenthusiastically. 

As for me, I think the #57 ranking on Flickchart was basically supported. Maybe it'll fall down into the 60s or 70s, but not much more than that. I had to fight back the tears when they finally splash down in the South Pacific. 

As an interesting side note: Apollo 13 is the fourth movie I have tagged on this blog that starts with the word Apollo, the others being the documentary about the first moon landing (Apollo 11), Richard Linklater's rotoscoped coming-of-age story centered around that moon landing (Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood) and a found footage horror about a hypothetical moon mission that never happened (Apollo 18). That Apollo 13 should be the best of those films -- though in a smaller margin over the first two than the third -- and only just now be getting its first tag on my 15-year-old blog is interesting indeed, and maybe a little sad. 

Landing (again, no pun intended) on The Truman Show was something I did after about five minutes of further scrolling on Stan. I wanted something short enough (since I do have to return to work today) yet also something with a bit of a grander scale to match the scale I'd just been watching. As an only one-time viewing, with that first viewing coming more than a quarter century ago, The Truman Show fit the bill perfectly. (And I noted that if The Truman Show were made today, it would have failed my first test for length, as it certainly would have been Apollo 13's 140 minutes rather than the 102 minutes it actually is.)

I was not necessarily the biggest fan of The Truman Show in 1998, in that there were people who embraced it more wholeheartedly than I did. Even as I say that, though, I'm checking my rankings for that year and find it at #10 overall -- which is more an indication of the number of films I ranked that year (58) than a true affection for the movie. I did always like it, but something had left me a little hesitant on it -- a feeling that has resulted in never watching it a second time.

Well, I'd say I probably liked it just a touch more than I remembered. I didn't have some big revelation about it, or a reading on it that seemed new to me. It's about what it's about tightly and efficiently, and I think it interestingly anticipates our fascination with reality TV, and sometimes our inability to separate a real person from a character we want to be subjected to dramatic things. 

Something I hadn't maybe considered about The Truman Show was its relationship to another Jim Carrey movie from that era that I adore, which is my #16 on Flickchart, The Cable Guy. Until this viewing I wouldn't have made the connection that both movies are about our desire to watch, and both movies feature a moment at or near the climax where a rapt audience effectively opts to change the channel and ask what else is on. As the more praised of the two movies, The Truman Show surely gets the credit for these thoughts that The Cable Guy does not -- but let's be real here, people. The Cable Guy predates The Truman Show by two years.

Two more quick thoughts:

1) I liked that before we have really been introduced to this world, we already see it falling apart -- literally as a way to preview its metaphorical collapse. One of the first things that happens to Truman is that he is almost hit by a light falling from the top of the dome, which might have not happened for ten minutes in a less efficient film. This also sets up how they explain away the weird phenomena Truman witnesses in the form of news broadcasts.

2) The efficiency of the script does, though, have a few narrative disadvantages. For one, I was sort of surprised that Truman never has it out with his "best friend" -- or so he thinks -- since he was seven, Marlon, played by Noah Emmerich. (Incidentally, Emmerich's entrance where he leads with a six-pack of beer has always been one of my enduring memories of this film.) Albeit only reading the dialogue that Harris' Christof is feeding into his ear, Marlon tells Truman that if everyone was in on a conspiracy against him, he'd have to be in on it too, and the last thing he'd ever do is lie to Truman. Clearly the actor playing Marlon does not like to read these lines, but he reads them, and he's never held accountable, which would certainly happen in today's longer version of this film. Then again, I like the fact that it is implied, through what happens in the story, that the betrayal of Truman by Marlon is so total, so callous, that he isn't even worthy of a big scene where Truman tears him a new one. Instead, Truman will just leave this world and never look back. 

And what about Ed Harris in all this?

Harris has a similar function but a very dissimilar status as a hero in the two films. In Apollo 13, he personifies the tireless, sleepless, unwilling-to-accept failure dedication of the many NASA employees not to lose these three men in space. Whether it's a particular sense of humanism or just his somewhat jingoist determination not to lose the first American in space on his watch, Harris' Gene Kranz does what needs to be done and does not rest until it's done -- and because he's such a cool customer, nary a hair on his head seems to be out of place.

In a film containing a lot more shades of gray than Apollo 13, The Truman Show's Christof is a lot more of a monster -- but he's not an uncomplicated monster. Yes, he is mostly driven by the vainglorious trappings of having created the most popular and longest running television show of all time. But it's also clear that on some level, he views Truman as a son, closer to him than any real person in his real life. When he therefore risks killing this surrogate son upon Truman threatening to leave him, it reveals significant complexities in the dynamics of this relationship. 

It is clear, though, that Harris was born to preside over a control room, because there is a third movie -- at least a third, possibly more -- I could have added to make this double feature a triple feature. It occurred to me that although his identity is not revealed until late in the movie, Harris plays the same role once again in Snowpiercer. Whether this was a conscious quotation of either of these two previous performances, or just something in Harris that suggests a man in (and possibly losing) control, only Bong Joon-ho may know. 

Fixing the main problem with Snowpiercer

Bong Joon-ho's 2013 film Snowpiercer is not the type of movie designed to withstand scrutiny. If you are going to go with it, you just have to stifle the many nitpicky inquiries that come to mind. Any question that starts with "How would they ...?" or "How could they ...?" is probably not going to have a satisfactory answer.

However, after watching one episode of the TV adaptation of this movie, I am satisfied that they've at least addressed my biggest qualm.

I don't see any mention in the Wikipedia plot description of the number of train cars in Bong's film, but if my memory of the movie serves me correctly, there were shots where you could see the entire train. That meant a vehicle with maybe 50 cars, a hundred cars max. 

If you break that down, it just doesn't work. Given that the "tail" has at least five cars, and that there's a large buffer zone between the "tailies" and the upper class twits who eat sushi and go to the spa, that could leave only 30 or so cars for those upper crust types. Given the sheer number of individual cars we see that aren't sleeping quarters -- dining cars, aquariums, arboretums, spas, dance clubs -- you are left with only a small number of cars where these people could actually get some privacy. And the supposition is that private quarters would probably hold a lot more value for these people than the ability to go to the spa.

Snowpiercer the TV show takes care of that from the start. In the opening monologue by star Daveed Diggs, he describes the train as having 1,001 cars.

That's more like it. 

When you are dealing with a behemoth of that size, you aren't going to spend much time worrying about what goes where. I don't yet know the total population of this show's train -- I assume it will come up in ensuing episodes -- but even if there are as many as 400 fancy rich people on board, they could each get their own car and still leave hundreds of cars left over that could be devoted to the excesses of the 1%. And I guess because of how trains work, the excessive length of the vehicle has little to do with how nimbly it can travel through mountain passes and over long bridges over water. 

While this is a satisfying correction to the source material, I am still left with at least two big questions, and will wait to see how the show deals with them.

1) At the speed this train is evidently traveling, how can it only circumnavigate the globe once in a year's time? My feeling is that it would take at most a month to make the trip.

2) After 16 years inside this train, how is everyone wearing what still looks to be new clothing? Do they really have the resources to switch out everyone's wardrobe enough for everything to seem very new and in vogue?

Of course, if I wanted to, I could keep listing nitpicky questions that would number more than 20 before I knew it.

Let's just see if the show is good enough to make me stifle them. 

Korean Christmas

Korean Jesus is a character in 21 Jump Street. Korean Christmas is something we inadvertently celebrated at my house this year.

First it was watching Snowpiercer, directed by South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho, on Christmas Eve. Then it was starting the Korean-financed animated movie The Nut Job, which includes an animated version of K-Pop star Psy, to wile away Christmas afternoon with the kids. (I finished it the next morning.) Then finally, on Christmas night, we demonstrated solidarity in our fight against oppressive dictatorships by renting The Interview, perpetrating our own type of "hacking" by using a VPN to convince Youtube Movies that we were actually in the United States.

I've already written about Snowpiercer and I hardly think it's worth spending much of my breath on one of the five worst animated movies I've ever seen, so that frees me up to spend the lion's share of this post on the most buzzed about movie of the past two weeks: The Interview. Before doing that, though, I'll give my standard coincidence disclaimer: We only ever intended to watch one of these three movies within a space of 36 hours, and I didn't even know The Nut Job was Korean until the closing credits.

That's right, we originally had a favorite lined up to watch on Christmas night (Perfume: The Story of a Murder, Anonymous and Elf were all discussed), but then Sony continued a very successful campaign to save face by making their controversial film The Interview available on a variety of online rental platforms. There was no way we were not going to do our share to strike a blow at the heart of North Korea -- and I'm glad to say that we survived the screening without a single threat to our lives.

We were only planning to watch it as a part of an international campaign to thumb our noses at the North Koreans, though. Bad early buzz on the film had convinced us that it wasn't going to be very shrewd or funny. I was excited to see it, but mostly in the same way I'd be excited to get my hands on any contraband material. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. (In terms of year-end lists, I was also excited to have early access to a movie that won't be available in Australian theaters until January 22nd, meaning I had already written it off for inclusion on my 2014 list.)

And then we both laughed harder than we had laughed at any movie in years.

Seriously, I think I might have laughed over 50 times during this movie. It was one of those instances of comedic syzygy, where every choice Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg made seemed to be a brilliant one, and the cumulative effect just put us both into a delirium of enjoyment. Oh, this is not highbrow. But it's the best lowbrow comedy I've seen in ages, and it has an overall highbrow rationale behind its existence.

Part of my lowered expectations had to do with a cynicism over Rogen's reason for making the movie in the first place. When I heard that Sony had scrapped the Christmas release of The Interview (but before realizing that they may not release it theatrically at all), I quickly wrote up a reaction that I never published. I'm glad now that I didn't publish it, because the thrust of the piece was that Rogen may have deserved this for making the movie in bad faith. I had this idea that he came up with the idea through a haze of weed smoke as a way simply to fuck with North Korea, because there was nothing they could do about it and fuck them. And so when I learned that North Korea did plan to do something about it, and that something was successful, I honestly though it was part of Rogen's just desserts. Not because I didn't believe in freedom of expression, but because I thought Rogen's motivations were essentially juvenile.

Having seen the movie, I disagree wholeheartedly that it was made on a lark. Rogen and Goldberg clearly did their research. The sets look terrific, and like a good approximation of what the Kim compound probably really looks like. The characters are written with real complexity, as the film does not contain a single two-dimensional bad guy. Kim himself is one of the film's most complicated characters, though ultimately, he is indeed revealed to be a genuine bastard. For a while, though, Rogen and Goldberg seduce us into thinking he could be someone a lot more sympathetic than we assume him to be.

The Interview is a combination of smart and dumb humor, committed performances, and a real sense of political intention.

If you haven't already done so, make this a Korean Christmas season in your household as well.

Polar express

The Polar Express, cinematically, is a largely disappointing and sometimes depressing 2004 film by Robert Zemeckis. It appears in the dictionary next to the term "uncanny valley."

However, in literary terms, it is the wonderful 1985 storybook by Chris Van Allsburg that inspired the movie. It's a painterly beauty whose every page is saturated with steam engines, children in bathrobes drinking hot chocolate, snowflakes, and magic. The story details the travels of a young boy to the North Pole on the titular locomotive, to meet Santa Claus and see him give out the first gift of Christmas. They go through forests and snowy plains and craggy mountains, all to end up at the cheery glow of industrial warmth that is the North Pole. For me, it's Christmas incarnate.

That's because my family has been reading it on Christmas Eve probably since my sister and I were teenagers. Every year when we were all together on Christmas Eve -- even into our adulthood -- my dad would read us the story. I soaked in the magic like a ten-year-old, even when I was a 30-year-old.

I believe I have now read it to my own son each of his five Christmases, even when he was only four months old. This year on Christmas Eve, I read it to two sons for the first time -- the second one crawling around and desperately trying to pull down the lamp.

It wasn't lost on me, then, that my wife and I immediately -- "immediately" meaning about 90 minutes later when they finally both went to sleep -- proceeded to watch the adult version of The Polar Express, otherwise known as Snowpiercer.

Two stories about trains speeding through wintry landscapes on the same evening? What were the chances? We should have watched Transsiberian and made it a triple feature.

I had already seen Snowpiercer in theaters, but my wife missed it, and it seemed of a sufficiently grand scale to make it our Christmas Eve viewing, even though nothing remotely cheery happens in the entire film. Yet you wouldn't call Snowpiercer depressing, either -- it's that strange tonal triumph of which Bong Joon-ho is so often capable.

It wasn't like we specifically scheduled it for Christmas Eve originally (hence the Polar Express alignment being happenstance rather than premeditated theme). We had figured to watch it one of the weekends leading up to Christmas. But part of the reason I delayed it was that I'd purchased us a new version of the HDMI adapter that allows us to watch stuff on my wife's Mac on our TV. The old one crapped out about six months ago, and since Snowpiercer is streaming on Netflix, we'd have been watching it on the computer without that cable. However, it was also fun to make that new cable my own "first gift of Christmas," which I presented to her moments after the kids finally left us in peace.

I don't have a lot else to say, I guess. As the passengers and the locomotive itself are always in distress, Snowpiercer has a lot more in common with the distended movie version of The Polar Express than the placid and lovely storybook. Coincidence is enough of an inspiration, and often the only inspiration, for me to write a post.

The movie does have one comical way in which it is diametrically opposed to The Polar Express, and not just that it's an R-rated movie for adults with tons of bloodshed. While the North Pole is, in a manner of speaking, the only place the train goes in The Polar Express, it's the only place the train does not go in Snowpiercer. Here, check out this route map, as seen in the film:

Oh, and Australia gets the short shrift as well. Hey, that's alright -- the outback is probably a pretty nice temperature on this future snow-covered earth, so those of us down there can just stay put.

I did wonder as I was watching Snowpiercer this time whether someone actually did the math, and determined that a train traveling at this breakneck speed would indeed take an entire year to circumnavigate the earth. Doesn't seem like it would, even with this circuitous route. In fact, if you told me that it would take less than two months to cover this route, I'd believe you.

It's just one of many, many, many ways we are asked to suspend disbelief while watching Snowpiercer. Here are a few others, and watch out for minor spoilers.

1) If everyone boarded the train on the day it started running, at Yekaterina Bridge in Russia, wouldn't all the passengers in steerage be Russians?

2) If the front section of the train is so fancy and has all these rooms of unimaginable excess, where are all the private living quarters?

3) If the train hasn't stopped for 17 years, why does everything in the fancy section seem like it's brand new, and how do they renew all their finite resources?

4) Who catches the ten million roaches needs to make all the protein blocks, and where do those roaches spend most of their time?

5) How do the passengers in steerage have dozens if not hundreds of axes?

6) Why does Wilford's henchman fire through the train's windows at his targets, with a very low probability of hitting his targets but a very high probability of destroying the windows?

And so forth.

So yeah, Snowpiercer definitely suffered a little bit from a second viewing. The thrill of discovering what will happen next, what's awaiting our intrepid heroes in the next car, is clearly key to the enjoyment of the film. Once you know, it's just not as satisfying, and there are plenty of nits to pick if you want to. It's only dropped one spot in my year-end rankings so far, but further position corrections could be forthcoming.

Still, on an Australian Christmas Eve in which the light didn't fade from the sky until sometime after 9 p.m., it was nice to be reminded of the parts of the planet that are, indeed, covered by snow.

Funny cannibalism, unfunny cannibalism, and somewhere in between

I didn't set out to see three movies about cannibalism within a space of ten days.

In fact, I didn't set out to see any movies about cannibalism in those ten days, but sometimes, life has a funny way of throwing cannibalism into your path.

I'll start with the two that are overtly about cannibalism, and include this big SPOILER WARNING before I discuss the third, even though that's the one I saw first. Unfortunately, telling you which movie is being spoiled, so you know whether you've seen it or not and should avoid reading about it, would be the spoiler itself in this case. However, it's not that big of a spoiler, so I'll just say ... if you aren't really caught up on the buzzworthy movies this summer, you may find out a little something you don't want to find out about one of those movies if you read this whole post. In any case, I'll include another spoiler warning before I actually start to discuss it, if you want to read to that point.

Funny cannibalism

No, I did not just watch Trey Parker's Cannibal! The Musical, though I have seen it, and the setting for it is actually pretty similar to what I did watch. Rather, Wednesday night on Netflix I watched what I would never have imagined could actually be any good: Antonia Bird's Ravenous. I remember that at the time this came out, I couldn't believe the way it was packaged, would have scoffed at the notion that it could provide anything to anybody other than guffaws.

I was right, but not in the way I thought.

It's clear from moment one of Ravenous that this movie is intended to be funny. It starts with two quotations on screen, the first a Nietzche quotation about fighting the beast without becoming the beast ... and the second the following: "Eat me." Attributed to Anonymous.

Yes, indeed.

The opening credits gave me two other causes for hope: The film is directed by Bird, an acclaimed director who helmed the movie Priest (the one starring Linus Roache, not the one starring Paul Bettany), and its score was the work of Blur's Damon Albarn and a composer named Michael Nyman. Reading up on the movie after the fact, I discover that Bird was actually the third director on the film after original director Milcho Manchevski was booted and the cast rejected replacement studio hack Raja Gosnell. So maybe her credit was something of a false friend, but it was a friend indeed during a moment of apprehension.

This may have been a troubled production, but it doesn't show in the final product. Oh no, this movie is not for everybody, but it is a surprisingly skillful and smartly executed movie that is exactly what it seems it means to be. It's a story of people who eat people to survive harsh wintry conditions in the American west ... initially out of desperation, but eventually out of the very specific type of hunger bequeathed upon them by their prior dietary transgressions.

Not only is the setting great -- the mid-19th century in an outpost where unwanted military types go to die -- but the movie's tone is great. It realizes there is something essentially outrageous about the idea of eating people, and relishes it. While many movies might play cannibalism as purely a case of human tragedy, Ravenous realizes that there's something unavoidably comical about it. Take the one scene where -- not to spoil anything -- two of our main characters are suddenly killed to feed the hunger of a particularly vampiric cannibal. Albarn's score -- truly one of the most memorable I have heard in years -- develops the jovial pace of bluegrass, when one might expect the moment to be mournful. It's not sad that these people have just died, in this particular movie -- it's funny. And really, it is. The key is that the movie is overtly taking itself seriously, unlike a parody like Cannibal! The Musical. That's what makes the humor work so well.

It may not be possible to describe the sublime humor of this movie beyond what I've already tried to do, so I will just leave you with the recommendation to give this movie a shot. It's fast-paced, it's sordid in all the right ways, and it's also just smart and structurally unusual. It's available for streaming on Netflix right now.

How I didn't intend to watch it: I pulled up to my computer on Wednesday with no idea what I was going to watch, and chose Ravenous randomly from my queue -- not because I'd seen a couple cannibal movies recently and wanted to compare it, but actually because I'd heard it mentioned recently on Filmspotting: SVU. The thematic connection to other recent viewings didn't occur to me until later.

Unfunny cannibalism

I can't give the same recommendation to Jonathan auf der Heide's Van Diemen's Land, a 2009 Australian film we watched last Friday night (which is not, however, my August entry for Australian Audient). This is a story that also takes place in a wilderness, but in an entirely different part of the world: the wilderness of 1822 uncharted Tasmania. It details the plight of eight Irish convicts who escape their shackles and flee into the Tasmanian unknown -- a place they soon realize is far less hospitable than life as prisoners.

In fact, as they tie up their guard to a tree, he incredulously asks them: "Where are you going to go? There's nothing out there."

Sure enough, Tasmania may be beautiful, but it's severely lacking in food sources. (Incidentally, where are the Tassie devils and the wallabys?) Cannibalism eventually ensues.

But it's not "fun cannibalism." It's "grim, murder-your-brother, watch-your-back, grimy, gristly cannibalism." Which is probably a lot more like what cannibalism is really like.

However, I didn't feel the human tragedy the film was intending me to feel, because it does such a poor job of establishing characters and differentiating them from one another. As all these guys are bearded fellows about the same age and build, they become indistinguishable, so each ensuing death has no narrative momentum or stakes. We don't hope one guy survives and another guy doesn't. Simply put, we don't care.

Van Diemen's Land, despite being a bore and a chore, is not a total failure because it actually models itself on the films of Terrence Malick. In other words, it's got lots of beautiful, lush shots of nature, and occasional poetic voiceover. Oddly and interestingly, even though the film's dialogue is mostly in English, the VO is in another language that I initially mistook for Dutch. And it may actually be Dutch because it sure doesn't sound like Gaelic, the only other foreign language I imagine Irish convicts might speak. (And the director's name sounds Dutch, right? And the former name of Tasmania, Van Diemen's Land, is Dutch, right?)

Even with a couple nice Malickian touches, though, the movie is exhausting to endure even at less than 90 minutes. The unfunny cannibalism doesn't help.

How I didn't intend to watch it: My wife came home with Van Diemen's Land as a (regrettably poor) substitute for I, Frankenstein. Her work has a library of movies they have worked on, from which employees can borrow. I, Frankenstein was not in, but this 2009 true story of convict Alexander Pearce was. Actually, since I haven't seen I, Frankenstein yet, I have no idea if it was a poor substitute or not.

OKAY, SPOILERS AHEAD!

Somewhere in between

One of my most bracing movie experiences of this year so far is Snowpiercer, Bong Joon-ho's (mostly) English-language debut, which had excited me so much that I covered my eyes and ears during two exposures to the trailer in the weeks leading up to seeing it. I'm glad to say that it lived up to the hype, and really deserves a longer discussion at another time. I was even mentally composing a piece about the brilliant Tilda Swinton when I got mentally sidetracked and never mentally returned to it. I guess I may still.

What's relevant to today's discussion is the big speech by Chris Evans near the end, when he reveals his involvement in shameful acts aboard the train that occurred long ago, but have left him scarred.

"I hate myself because I know what people taste like," says Evans' Curtis Everett, through tears. "I know that babies taste best."

Perhaps the biggest of the many surprises of Snowpiercer was what followed: laughter. A good dozen people in my audience laughed, some sardonically, at this line, a line that exposes the character as a desperate man who once snacked on infant children to survive.

I was a bit taken aback by the laughter in my screening, but I soon found out that it wasn't just that I was watching this with a particularly perverse subset of Melburnians. In fact, when I posted about having seen Snowpiercer on Facebook, a friend of mine commented "Babies taste best." I shared that I was surprised to hear laughter at that line, and he responded that there was howling in his theater following the line. He said it was such an over-the-top line that you had to laugh. I said that I didn't have to laugh, and a couple others backed me up in the comments section.

However, I do agree that laughter could have been Bong's intention, because absurd humor is prevalent in this movie. I guess that in this case, I didn't want to have a Ravenous moment where I just luxuriated in the Grand Guignol absurdity of it all. I wanted to experience it as a genuine confession of genuine grief, a climactic moment in this character's personal journey. To laugh would have been to undercut the work that Evans was doing, and to undercut the seriousness of a scene that I believed was meant to be serious.

How I didn't intend to watch it: I did actually -- I was looking forward to it for a couple months. I just didn't know there was a cannibalism element to it.

So what has my 10-day exposure to cannibalism at the movies taught me?

I suppose it's that the act of eating another person is so extreme that our only recourse can sometimes be to laugh, whether it's nervous laughter (as in Snowpiercer, I would argue) or hearty chuckling (as in Ravenous) or downright busting our gut (that would be Cannibal! The Musical, watched by me a decade ago).

Cannibalism that doesn't make us laugh?

Well, then you've got a snoozefest like Van Diemen's Land.