The Tin Drum (1979)

I picked a war flick for Veterans Day, but it wasn't the best choice. The protagonist isn't a soldier, and the soldiers we see don't exactly look good to us. You'll understand why in a moment.

On his third birthday, Oskar (David Bennent, actual age 11 at the time) deliberately injures himself in a way that prevents him from growing physically anymore, which ensures that people never treat him as fully adult. That premise alone can be pretty disturbing, but it's also set in Nazi-occupied Poland. His own family sometimes supports the invaders, tho they learn better eventually.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

This was actually my first viewing this month, but I opted to wait until after a scheduled Meetup discussion to write my review. It's the kind of film I have trouble evaluating without a broader perspective.

In modern rural Thailand, Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar), around age 60, has a kidney disorder and knows he is not long for this world. Perhaps that's why the ghost of his wife (Natthakarn Aphaiwong) shows up and sticks around. Soon after, their long-vanished adult son (Jeerasak Kulhong) returns as a sort of glowing-eyed yeti, explaining that he got that way from sex with another such creature, which he calls a Monkey Ghost. Everyone in the homestead -- including Boonmee's nephew and caretaker (Sakda Kaewbuadee), who's not as prominent as the title implies -- acknowledges these surprise guests but is not alarmed. Indeed, things progress quite peacefully toward the conclusion, a mix of the inevitable and the unpredictable.

Daughters of the Dust (1991)

I had rejected this option once before, but a Meetup group was set to discuss it. You can tell it's a small group, because they rescheduled when I couldn't get the disc as soon as estimated. I made a point to wait until the day of our session to watch so the details would stay fresh in my mind. Let's hope I remember enough of the discussion now.

In 1902, much of a large Gullah/Geechee family prepares to move from what is best known as St. Simons Island, Georgia, to the mainland for better opportunities. Among other things, this includes a visit from relatives who have already been away for quite a while, and it shows, especially with the Christian convert (Kaycee Moore). The old matriarch (Cora Lee Day) is too traditional to leave, and her grandson (Adisa Anderson) has trouble deciding.

Dreams (1990)

Wisely marketed by Netflix as "Akira Kurosawa's Dreams," this is my first anthology viewing since...well, another Kurosawa piece. It's also from later in his career than anything else I've seen. I figured I'd like it better than Dodes'ka-den, partly because dreams are bound to be at least close to fantasy.

There are eight stories, generally set in 20th-century Japan. In "Sunshine Through the Rain," a young boy ignores his mother's warning not to go into the woods on a day with the titular weather, because kitsune have weddings then and don't brook human witnesses. In "The Peach Orchard," another boy, missing the peach trees that his family clearcut, sees their strangely human-shaped spirits. In "The Blizzard," four mountain climbers are on the verge of succumbing, possibly to the yuki-onna, before reaching their camp. In "The Tunnel," a former WWII commander walks through a tunnel and meets the ghosts of men who died following his orders and don't know it yet. In "Crows," a budding artist imagines(?) himself meeting an anglophone Vincent van Gogh (Martin Scorsese!) in France and traversing the scenes of several paintings. In "Mount Fuji in Red," a nuclear meltdown rapidly depopulates the volcanic area, with most people deciding they'd rather drown than face cancer. In "The Weeping Demon," on another mountain, radioactivity has effectively turned humans into demons in a Buddhist hell. And in "Village of the Waterfalls," a traveler discovers a contented Luddite village.

Lost Highway (1997)

My previous familiarity with David Lynch was actually pretty diverse: The Elephant Man (very good), Blue Velvet (gruesome but admirable), The Straight Story (surprisingly tame and a bit dull), and Dune (bad enough to delay my reading of the book as well as further viewings of Lynch). Lost Highway sounded more bizarre than any of those, more along the lines of another David. Thus, I was both intimidated and intrigued to try it.

The plot is hard to summarize without spoilers, because it takes a while for things to get underway, but I'll go as far as the Netflix jacket: In L.A., night club saxophonist Fred (Bill Pullman) starts to receive strange messages by intercom, phone, or videotape, some of them quite creepy if not seemingly impossible. Then his likely adulterous wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette), gets brutally murdered. Fred doesn't see who did it, but all available evidence points to him, and he gets convicted. Then his story really takes a turn: He metamorphoses into young mechanic Pete (Balthazar Getty).

I Lost My Body (2019)

The announcement of Academy Award nominations was the first I'd heard of this Netflix-adopted feature. I didn't bother to learn much about it in advance. The title told me to expect drama, and I knew it was foreign if not French.

Oddly enough, the "I" of the title refers to an entity incapable of verbal communication: a severed right hand that has mysteriously taken on a life of its own. (This isn't a backstory for the Addams Family's Thing; the skin's too dark.) Retaining more than just muscle memory, it sneaks out of a lab fridge in search of the rest of its body, a young man named Naoufel (Dev Patel in the English dubbing). Scattered throughout the movie are flashbacks in the life of Naoufel, the early ones appearing in black and white, often with a camera focus on his hand.

Mirai (2018)

This 2018 Best Animated Feature nominee, the final one I've viewed, must have received the least attention of the five, at least in the West. After all, the director is Mamoru Hosoda, not Hayao Miyazaki, and the production company is Studio Chizu, not Studio Ghibli. But the fanciful poster drew me in.

Kun, age 4, initially welcomes newborn sister Mirai (whose name means "future") but becomes irritable as his parents pay less attention to him and as Mirai proves too limited in abilities to offer fun. When neither parent watches, however, Kun meets people he shouldn't be able to meet. It begins with the household dog turning into a man with a tail. Then Mirai appears as a 14-year-old, incongruously calling him "big brother." Other strange encounters and travels ensue from there, giving Kun new perspectives on his family and himself.

The Red Turtle (2016)

I hadn't planned on seeing two Japanese animations in a row; I just noticed that this one was playing at the theater and wouldn't be available on Netflix until May. Fortunately, it's only slightly Japanese: While the Studio Ghibli label turns up first, it's one of seven production companies. The director is Dutch-British, and most of the people involved are from France or Belgium. (That would explain the Tintin-like character designs.)

An adult male castaway on a bamboo-forested island shoves off on a raft, but the titular turtle bumps it to pieces from beneath. He finds the turtle on the beach and overturns her but then guiltily tries to keep her alive. Then, without explanation, she turns into a human in a half-shell. And eventually wakes up and gets out of it (off screen). No longer hasty to leave, the half-dazed man falls for the woman. They go on to have a son, who grows increasingly curious about the outside world....

Ixcanul (2015)

I think I put this film on my list for being different. Not only is it a rare entry from Guatemala; its main language is one I'd never heard of: Kaqchikel, of the Mayan family. It's also quite popular internationally but not widely discussed in the English-speaking world; neither IMDb nor Wikipedia presently tells us much about it. As for why I saw it last night, well, it's only 93 minutes.

In a mountain village, teen María has been promised in marriage to Ignacio, her father's employer at a coffee plantation, for the sake of job security. She'd rather welcome the advances of close-in-age Pepe, who plans to hoof it to the U.S. Pepe shows no such commitment to take her away, but he does put her "in the family way" before disappearing, thereby threatening her family's situation. The methods María and her parents have of dealing with the situation are highly informed by native traditions, which I can't recommend based on the results, but a trip to a Spanish-speaking city (with Ignacio as the translator!) doesn't help either....

The Age of Adaline (2015)

There's something to be said for taking a single sci-fi/fantasy concept and running with it. Unlike world building, it doesn't require a lot of fine details; the audience can concentrate where it matters. The premise doesn't even have to be totally fresh if you know what you're doing.

In 1937, a highly improbable accident yields even more improbable results: Adaline (Blake Lively) stops physically aging at 29. A narrator gives pseudo-scientific justification and alludes to a future theory, but it's not important, especially since Adaline herself never learns it. Like some other ageless characters I've known, she makes a point not to stay in one place with the same identity for long, lest she garner unwelcome attention from unethical researchers. This means limited contact with her daughter (Ellen Burstyn), who looks much older than her by the present, when the bulk of the movie takes place. Despite Adaline's understandable aloofness as "Jenny," young man Ellis (Michiel Huisman) persistently courts her. She starts to warm up to him but is not prepared for another unlikely accident: His dad (Harrison Ford) was her boyfriend four decades ago....

When Marnie Was There (2014)

I make a point to watch more than half the Academy Best Animated Feature nominees in any given year. I had seen two from 2015 already and may add Boy & the World, but Anomalisa sounds disturbing. Coming on the heels of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya and The Wind Rises, WMWT marks the first time that Studio Ghibli got three back-to-back nominations, tho still no Oscar since Spirited Away.

The setting appears to be '60s Japan. Twelve-year-old Anna starts the movie as a self-loathing loner, stressed enough to compound her asthma. Her foster parents send her on a wellness trip to the country home of...let's call them her aunt and uncle. At first she's still depressed, but she takes interest in a reportedly abandoned mansion that somehow seems familiar -- and meets a same-age girl living there, eager to take a break from an oppressive home life. The two form a strong if secret bond in no time, but something seems off about Marnie's appearances and disappearances, as well as Anna's tendency to wake up a ways from where she thought she was. Anna starts to question Marnie's reality, and the plot gets a little more complicated....

Moby Dick (1956)

Even after getting burned by Lynch's Dune, I make a point to watch adaptations from famous novels I'm unlikely to read. Oh, I do read long and heady books for leisure, but enough people have deemed Herman Melville's classic dull that I'd rather take a chance on a two-hour vicarious boat ride, particularly one with respectable IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes scores as well as reputedly decent fidelity. (I didn't trust the facetious stage musical.) Being in a poor position to evaluate the fidelity, I must settle for the cinematic quality.

You should all know the story's gist: Nineteenth-century whaling ship captain Ahab (Gregory Peck) unwisely seeks vengeance on the oddly named white whale. Little did I imagine how late in the story narrator Ishmael (Richard Basehart) sees Ahab's face or hears his voice. I think the island savage Queequeg gets more screen time. Guess Ahab, for all his obsession, has the most stand-out personality on the Pequod. I hardly know how to describe first mate Starbuck (Leo Genn), and he's one of the more famous characters. We learn a lot more names, but in this capsulized edition, they hardly seem worth remembering; only the cabin boy gets my sympathy.

Birdman (2014)

At last I've seen half the Best Picture nominees, and one of the most favored at that! I had not been excited to see it, because what I'd read made it sound like The Wrestler with a little magic realism (which could be very good, just not worth excitement going in). Fortunately, what I got was far more distinctive and only occasionally predictable.

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu, previously best known for Babel and Amores perros, must have since taken lessons from his buddy Alfonso Cuarón, because this film loves long tracking shots even more than Gravity. Normally this technique helps you feel more present, but whenever it becomes clear that things have not been happening in real time, the scarcity of obvious cuts to other cameras enhances the surreality instead. And for all the credible dialog and genuine show biz concerns, you'd better believe it's surreal.