Saturday, January 16, 2021

Piloting into 2021

I'm done with all the year-end posts, so time to get back to pointing out coincidences, right?

This is a pretty good one: The first two movies I've seen since closing my year-end rankings were about World War II fighter pilots.

You could say I planned it, but you'd be wrong.

A Matter of Life and Death, the most prominent Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger movie I had yet to see, jumped to the front of my queue by virtue of it being discussed on the podcast The Next Picture Show, where they match a classic film with a new release to discuss the former's influence on the latter over a pair of consecutive episodes. I had already seen the latter, Soul, and figured I might as well whack out a viewing of the former so I could get something out of both episodes of the podcast. The film is not widely available, but it's on YouTube so I got to work.

Simply put, I loved this. Just a few days after the post in which I mentioned ten great films I saw in 2020 that weren't released in 2020, I'm pretty sure I've already got one of my entries for the corresponding post I'll write a year from now. 

The 1946 film is about a British fighter pilot (David Niven) who has a distress call with a female American dispatcher (Kim Huner) as his plane is engulfed in flames over the English Channel. Before he jumps, without a parachute, to his certain death, the two kind of fall for each other in the intensity of the moment. However, something goes wrong with the afterlife bureaucracy -- something about the heavy fog over Britain -- and he washes up on shore, unharmed, in spitting distance of where the dispatcher is stationed. As the two finally meet each other and forge a genuine connection that might be love, Niven is visited by representatives from that afterlife (which is pictured in black and white to the technicolor of the earthly settings), who try to correct the mistake. But Niven now figures he's got a case to be made about why he should stay on earth.

Connections to Soul pretty obvious, no?

I was flabbergasted not only by the film's great script, but by the techniques it uses, unusual in a film from that era, to create supernatural settings and images of other worlds. The film opens on an image of the universe before panning down to Niven's doomed plane, and the afterlife is replete with imagery of an otherworldly waystation involving fantastical architecture. The Archers (the nickname for this pair of directors) employ other fascinating techniques like freeze frame that were not regularly used at the time. The shot seen from behind the closing eyelid of a person going into surgery, which would have required the construction of a large papier mache eyeball, just furthers this film's sense of delightful creativity.

I could go on and on about A Matter of Life and Death, but we have a second film to get to. Which is also worth going on about.

The first trailer I saw for a 2021 movie was Shadow in the Cloud, and it struck me right away as the first film I might see for my newly launched list. It seemed the perfect example of the type of film that gets released early in the year to try to capture an audience, a wild genre mashup that might be too eccentric to compete with the big summer releases but could certainly carve out a niche early in the year. Of course, that's using conventional release logic, which certainly doesn't apply during a pandemic. Though it's starting out as an old-fashioned conventional year in Australia, considering that this movie did get released in January and I did see it in the cinema.

Shadow in the Cloud is a New Zealand production from a director I had never heard of, Roseanne Liang, a Kiwi of Chinese descent. It stars Chloe Grace Moretz -- whom I loved when she was a kid, but have not really liked for the past five years -- as a woman boarding a plane from New Zealand to Samoa during World War II. She's an officer with flying experience but of course she is derided and degraded by the sexist all-male crew who don't understand why there's a woman on board their plane. They have orders for her to be there and she's escorting a high-value package, so they reluctantly accept her on board but make her sit in the lower turret for takeoff. Where she gets stuck when a literal gremlin starts dismantling the plane mid-flight.

This movie is an absolute gas. It's set in World War II but has a driving early 80s synth score. It's got a CGI gremlin and also a lot of thrilling air battle sequences. But there are also parts of it that could be a stage play, in the best possible sense. Simply put, it's a jolt of adrenaline to start us off right on the new year.

I may step away from movies about World War II pilots for my third new-to-me movie in 2021, but you never know with these things.

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