Protean Musical Reich
Now Playing: Stuff I just watched on the big screen
PROTEUS (2004, David Lebrun)- pretty cool, if slight, this film introduces viewers to the work of 19th-century biologist/artist Ernst Haeckel, who contributed to evolutionary theory with his studies of marine radiolarians. Haeckel's work held a great interest to scientists of the period not only because radiolarians were so tiny (a single cell) and so varied (he found over 4000 different kinds), but also because he was able to create such detailed diagrams of the creatures. By extension, the film also looks into the mid-1800s' fascination with undersea exploration, equating marine scientists' searches with the journey of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (portions of the poem are read by Richard Dysart). At sixty minutes, the film doesn't really go into detail about its subject or the times in which he lived, but it never wears out its welcome either. Rating: **1/2.

NOTRE MUSIQUE (2004, Jean-Luc Godard)- wish I could say I enjoyed this, but the truth of the matter is that I was really tired while watching it, and I nodded off a few times during the central "Purgatory" segment. The opening, entitled "Hell," is pretty stunning, a 10-minute montage of war images, both documentary and fictional re-creation, with no attempt made by Godard to point out the difference between the two (makes sense, after all, since many people identify battlefield carnage with the opening of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN rather than anything they've seen on television). The final section, "Heaven," might have made more sense to me had I stayed awake through everything that came before, but from what I could see it was pretty gorgeous. Also, I really want to know what the music was that Godard used to score the "Hell" section- dissonant, but more elegiac than apocalyptic. No rating- need to see again.

THE RASPBERRY REICH (2004, Bruce LaBruce)- this porn-centric satire of radical activism has basically two main jokes: that even the most ostensibly free-thinking people are still hemmed in by "bourgeois" ideas, and that most radical behavior tends to be pretty ridiculous. The film is much more successful in addressing the first point largely because it buries it underneath scene after scene focusing on the second- we see character breaking free of "conventional" sexual arrangments (monogamy, heterosexual coupling, etc.) but there's just as much jealousy as there would be in more mainstream relationships. The film just doesn't remark upon it that much, largely because the character's mouths (when they're talking anyway) are more concerned with spouting mass quantities of revolutionary rhetoric. And it's this stuff that, frankly, bored me, as it almost always does in movies (leading me to believe that the revolution never took hold because people could never start talking about it enough to actually make it happen)- even when strident speechifying is meant as a put-on, as it is here, it still gets annoying quickly, even more so when LaBruce flashes large segments of the text up onto the screen as text. Also, there's lots of sex, both gay and straight, so if you're into either or both of these (particularly the former), the film won't be a total wash. Rating: *1/2.