August 26: Anomalisa (2015 - Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson)

★★★★★

The strength of Anomalisa is way Kaufman marries his stop-motion puppet animation to the theme.  The film centers on Michael Stone, a middle-aged man mired in an existential mid-life crisis.  His world is filled with banality and repetition; nothing seems real, vital or unique to him, and the stop-motion world he lives in emphasizes this.

Most of the film is set in a bland city, Cincinnati, and most of the action transpires in a hotel-chain environment.  Everything from Michael’s taxi ride to his check-in procedure and his room décor transpires in the characterless patterns of business travel, and even the dialog sounds scripted by the hospitality industry, a fact especially emphasized when room service repeats Michael’s order back to him in embellished, corporate vocabulary.  The puppet world here is remarkably effective at highlighting the banality of this environment.  The artificial feeling of the sets as reproduced for stop-motion defamiliarizes this familiar corporate look and makes us notice it.  In addition, the puppets Michael encounters all look alike, all have the same seams and joints, and they’re all voiced by the same actor, Tom Noonan.  Even Michael himself is a part of the uniform blandness.  And when he seeks some stimulation to pierce the ennui that envelops him, he finds more of the same.  His call to his family in LA implies an unexciting home life, and when he reaches out to an old girlfriend in Cincinnati, he’s reminded of his communication failure and is again unable to have a real connection with an Other.  And in these episodes, Kaufman again uses the same puppets and the same voice, emphasizing the dullness of the world Michael sees.  Even gender differences succumb to the banality.

The existential prison that Michael has created for himself becomes clear in the episode with Lisa.  At first, her simple vitality and sincerity pierce the sameness around him.  Her voice is different (it’s Jennifer Jason Leigh), and the two ultimately have sex in Michael’s room, an intense, personal experience of the reality of the Other during which their voices merge.  However, even at this point Michael is already turning Lisa into an extension of himself, telling her what to do -- “Say something,” he directs her.  She soon becomes part of the homogeneity around him.  As they talk over breakfast that morning, she mentions the zoo, just as the taxi driver has, and we see Michael wedging her into his category of unexceptional.  Michael tells her not to click her spoon on her teeth when she eats, and soon Kaufman shifts her dialog into reverb, sonically implying her distance from Michael.  In his mind she’s no longer special, and he’s again alone in his unexceptional world.

Although he can’t see it, Michael’s stop-motion world is one of his own making.  Hair flowing as she rides in a car on the way home, Lisa writes him that their time was wonderful and special to her.  And at Michael’s surprise homecoming party, Michael’s exasperated wife tells him, “Do you realize we all love you?”  Michael, however, can’t see the world around him and the love it holds.  His is a world of stop-motion sameness though, as he stares at Anomalisa, the Japanese Goddess of Heaven that he bought for his son in a porn shop, he knows he’s missing something.  And Charley Kaufman's achievement in Anomalisa is a remarkably effective merger of technique and theme.

August 25: In the Courtyard/Dans la cour (2014 - Pierre Salvadori)

★★★

In the Courtyard is a bittersweet movie about communication.  Gustave Kervern’s stocky Antoine carries a portly sadness as he understands the pain in the people around him but is unable to soothe the pain because he can't communicate.  In particular, he’s can't help Catherine Deneuve’s Mathilde as she sinks ever deeper into a depression, but Antoine also almost unwillingly becomes friends with other wounded residents of the apartment building.  He lives in a world of pain he can see but not address.

This could be a story of great pathos or melodrama, but Pierre Salvadori enlivens it with comic touches.  From one of the earliest scenes, when a man in a park loses his temper because his protégé is unable to create large hoop bubbles, Salvadori’s humor distances us from the visceral psychic pain all the characters experience.  Lev has a dark, violent past he can’t express in language and Stéphane once had a promising soccer future cut short by injury, but Lev’s devotion to the Emissaries of the Institute of Light adds to humor to his character and Stéphane’s serial bicycle theft does the same.

Unfortunately, the shallow depth of the script holds In the Courtyard back from having the impact it could.  We see some of the personalities of both Antoine and Mathilde, but we’re not able to empathize enough with them as we watch them from the outside rather than feel what they’re feeling.  There are fun cinematic gestures in the film – witty editing in a park scene with children and a 50s-style dog-monster attack on a city – but for Salvadori to carry our hearts though the grim conclusion, we need more engagement with the main characters.

August 21: Gold (1934 - Karl Hartl)

★★★

Karl Hartl has picked all the right parts of early-30s German sci-fi to make Gold.  The technology in the film suggests Metropolis, the appearance of Brigitte Helm suggests Metropolis, and the underground chamber filling with water at the end suggests Metropolis.  There’s a lot of electricity in the air and scientific language like “atomic,” and there’s a scientist with a girlfriend and a mission.  And there are spies and bad guys who are out to conquer the world.  It should be a rollicking good ride.

But it isn’t; Gold drags as a sci-fi action/romance feature.  One of the biggest problems is Hans Albers’ inability to bring any charisma to the hero.  Werner Holk’s devotion to his martyred mentor, Prof. Achenbach, seems more dutiful than heartfelt, and it’s hard to imagine how an elegant, dynamic woman like Florence Wills, who dominates the screen whenever Helm brings her on, could be attracted to a frumpy, middle-aged man like Holk.  Michael Bohnen imparts far more range and energy to Holk’s nemesis John Wills than Albers does to the story’s lead, and the result is that the center of the film is dull.

Another problem is that script bogs down in places and unhelpfully fritters away time.  The opening section runs long in establishing Holk’s situation; the sabotage of the experiment dawdles, and the time Holk shares with his love, Margit, could have been reduced since there’s little screen chemistry between them anyway.  Too much is also made of the initial encounters between Holk and John Wills, and while the time Helm is on-screen is some of the best in the film, the long evening between Florence and Werner indeed seems long.  Then there’s an extra character introduced when Holk arrives on Wills’ boat.  Holk’s long-lost buddy has very little function in the film and even creates some confusion later when we see Holk with him at the film’s end on a boat that is different from the one he commands.  This character is a long and repeated digression.

The one part of the production that Hartl gets right is how the film looks on the screen.  With the Metropolis team, Hartl gives us a huge, flashy atomic apparatus for changing lead to gold.  There is more than ample action around this machine, which itself creates tension because it can barely contains its own power when it operates.  Other great technology includes a train-pod for underground transportation, an innovation that we see in later sci-fi, and there are massive doors and elevators.  In addition to the technology, the world of Florence Wills offers striking visuals.  Florence’s statuesque beauty dominates the screen when she has a full-figure shot, and her sculpted facial features demand our gaze when she talks in close-ups.  She may have the highest eyebrows in cinema.  Hartl adds to her visual power by dressing her in striking gowns, like the dotted one she wears when she first meets Holk and the one she wears later that has an outlandishly feathered collar.  There’s lots to look at on the screen in Gold.

Hartl also uses engaging cinematic techniques.  For example, after Holk is taken to a hospital when his experiment explodes, Hartl uses a long pan that goes from Margit and around the hospital room until it stops on Holk’s face.  The camera holds there and shot dissolves into the same pose with Holk healed and in his home office, a tour de force camera sequence.  In addition, Hartl uses rapid cuts to build up each of the major explosions in the film, creating suspense by using quick cuts to various people and places around the apparatus as the soundtrack hums and crackles.  And Hartl avails himself of the low key Expressionist lighting that is not uncommon in his time.  All these techniques create a visual interest that can engage us when the story becomes slow or the actors fail to touch us.

Although it was a major hit at the time, Gold isn’t must-see cinema.  It certainly looks good frame-to-frame, but it fails to move an audience because of its several shortcomings.  And while the film was completed shortly after the National Socialists came to power in Germany, it’s very unlikely that the party was able to exert much influence on a project that was already so far along in development.  While Gold has a slap at capitalists, especially British ones, the economic critique here is far more cinematic than it is ideological.  Gold is an interesting experience but not a necessary one.

August 20: Gilda (1946 - Charles Vidor)

★★★★

This film is a studio system star vehicle, and Rita Hayworth deserves it.  She owns the screen whenever she appears, from her justly-famed entrance flinging her hair up from the bottom of the frame to the fulfilled look on her face as she and Johnny exit the door at the end.  She brings intensity to all the aspects of her character.  She deploys her considerable sexual allure when she digs at Johnny by seductively dancing with another man early in the film, and she’s a nonchalant minx on the arm of another man when she returns home late one night to Johnny's glare.  She brings the same sex appeal to bear on her two big dance sequences, one a bare-midriff tropical performance and the other her famous club performance, wrapped in strapless, black gown with arm-length gloves.  Director Charles Vidor enhances this latter performance with a close-up that excludes the gown and by having a couple of excited men offering to help her with her dress, but it’s Hayworth’s charisma that brings the electricity here.  She knows how to tease the camera and the men who gaze at the screen.

But Hayworth’s Gilda doesn’t control all parts of her life as thoroughly as she does her sex appeal.  Beneath her meanness to Johnny is her love for him, and she alternates between mourning the loss of whatever relationship they had and openly flinging herself at him.  Hayworth brings as much intensity to these scenes as she does to her vixen play.  Her hair flies as wildly when she’s angry as it does when she seduces, and it adds to the pathos of her submission to Johnny.

The same over pressured tension that drives Gilda also drives Johnny.  The male in this 40s film has to choose between his allegiance to the other male, Ballin, or to follow his heart to Gilda.  For most of the film, Johnny chooses patriarchy and coldly busies himself with keeping Gilda at the ready for Ballin, but Gilda suspects his motives are mixed. She thinks he’s keeping her from other men because of his own repressed jealousy.  There’s more than a passing similarity between Johnny here and the aloof Devlin with his loyalty to his job in another 1946 film, Hitchcock’s Notorious.  But in Gilda, even after Ballin’s death, Johnny continues to repress Gilda, coldly seducing her into marriage and then locking her away with a portrait of Ballin dominating her new home.  The extremes of Johnny’s emotions become even more apparent when he has Gilda brought back to him after her escape and the two confess their love.  Glen Ford isn’t able to convincingly deliver Johnny’s repressed turmoil, but the scripted actions of Johnny tell the story well enough.

A lot of this film is hard for a contemporary viewer.  We would prefer to see such a powerful woman more in control of herself, and the extremes of Johnny's actions are difficult to completely accept, even when we only see them as external actions.  But Hayworth’s performance alone make Gilda a cinematic pleasure to enjoy anyway, and when the overwrought psychology of the characters and the quicksilver quality of their relationship are added to the mix, Gilda becomes an genuine cinematic pleasure.

August 19: A Touch of Zen/Xia nü (1971- King Hu)

★★★★

Kung-fu movies with their wisp of plot that lets the film move from one action scene to the next appeal to a particular audience but have trouble reaching beyond that group.  A Touch of Zen, though, easily moves beyond kung-fu formula and offers lots to interest a broader audience.

For one, King Hu maintains a lot of visual interest here.  His settings and imagery engage, whether of a monastery elegantly rising from a montane forest or of a group of people walking through a riverbed of sculpted rock.  Costumes vary by social level, but those worn by the upper classes are colorful and richly patterned, and they flow with the movements of the characters wearing them.  They are an important pictorial element.  Hu’s composition within the frame also stimulates the screen.  He clearly draws on China’s visual art tradition when he has small people move though large landscapes or when he uses sudden, graphic close ups.  And in a more cinematic vein, he uses the frame in a unique way by sometimes having only a character’s legs or torso shoot into the screen during a fight scene.  His cinema is interesting to watch simply for the visuals.

He also brings especially engaging story elements into Touch of Zen.  In the early part of the film, Hu uses perspective to keep us in the dark about a number of things that are happening.  Through the eyes of the scholar Ku, we meet a mysterious stranger, notice some members of the village acting oddly, and discover a young woman with a scanty past living in an abandoned house near Ku.  These elements don’t confuse the audience but rather involve us, drawing us along in the narrative because we want the full story of these little mysteries.  Hu’s plot also keeps us involved because the unexpected can happen at any moment.  A group of monks can be a fierce fighting team, and a character like Hsu can repent of his evil ways only to suddenly turn on the Abbot and stab him.  Other engaging elements of the story include the fact that the center of martial expertise is not our hero but rather our heroine, Yang.  And as any story, the fight between good and evil itself has an attraction since we all dread the victory of evil.  All these elements keep even a martial arts non-fan engaged in Touch of Zen.

It’s also clear from early on that Touch of Zen isn’t operating in a realist cinematic aesthetic.  Hu draws on Cantonese-style Chinese opera for this film, and a big part of the pleasure in watching it is to see how these non-cinematic elements work in cinema.  And they create a cohesive and unique cinematic experience here.  Hu has his actors perform in a highly stylized manner with long pauses and meaningful looks.  In addition, he brings in stereotypical figures, like the Abbot, and inscribes a deeply melodramatic element into their story.  Hu’s use of traditional Chinese instruments and music is another operatic element.  The music meshes seamlessly with the melodrama and acting style, especially when the music lends a particularly effective rhythm to a scene, sometimes punctuating the pivotal point.  Hu also bases his numerous action sequences on opera.  Rather than intense enactment of fighting, the combats here are choreographed acrobatic performances, including the obvious use of trampolines.  A big part of the achievement, and appeal, of Touch of Zen is the integration of Chinese opera into an engaging film.

Touch of Zen is not without its problems, though.  For one, it’s hard to find the center of the film.  For a time, the development of Ku is the primary focus, but then that focus shifts to Yang’s struggle for vindication.  Later, the movie emphasizes the Abbot and his spirituality.  Reflecting this wandering focus, the narrative can get turgid here, too.  One major flaw occurs late in the film when it seems that Ku has lost Yang, and he begins his journey home with his child and heir in his arms.   All the narrative lines are wrapped up at this point, but there’s suddenly a scene with the Abbot telling Yang that he’ll even help her defend Ku even from nirvana, and a very long series of fights soon ensues.  At this point, the film shifts from story-centered to action-centered, and there’s a very long section of the film dedicated to a series of fights.  This very long last section of the film seems tacked on since it differs so much from what has come before.

 Another problem is the frequent choppy editing, especially in action sequences when we see a piece of a movement and then jump to a different piece of another movement.  And Hu is overly reliant on low angle shots and backlighting, an appropriation of a technique that was popular in 1970 but seems dated when it’s used too much today.

Despite the drawbacks to Touch of Zen, this is a film that provides a lot of cinematic pleasure to viewers.  Much of the movie applies effective cinematic technique, and its interesting merger of a traditional art form and cinema makes it especially worthwhile.

August 18: A Little Chaos (2014 -- Alan Rickman)

★★

Alan Rickman brings a lot of good elements together in A Little Chaos.  It’s beautiful to look at, from the elaborate work of the art department to the interesting visual contrasts between the natural countryside of rural Versailles and the powdered wigs and lace of the court.  Ellen Kuras’ cinematography also generates visual interest with its moody lighting and elegant camera movement.  Samuel Karl Bohn’s music blends Baroque with contemporary minimalism, complementing the updated approach Rickman takes with this historical drama.  The performances here are also strong, especially those of Kate Winslet, Matthias Schoenaerts and Stanley Tucci.

Yet Rickman is unable to bring all these excellent elements into the happy union of a good film.  Despite the performances, the script doesn’t give us enough information to let us accept the characters’ behaviors.  It comes as a surprise when Sabine tentatively reaches for Le Nôtre’s hand as there has been no previous indication of affection, and we likewise lack understanding of Le Nôtre’s motivation through most of the movie.  His brooding lacks cause, while Sabine’s borders on cliché.  The development of the character of Louis XIV seems tangential to the main dramatic thrust of the film and feels a little like the director putting himself center stage.  And as beautiful as the film is, the long visual sequences slow the film’s pace and we find ourselves with too many court and construction scenes.  The result is a film that moves slowly and whose characters lack a cohesive arc.

For all its good points, this film moves slowly and unconvincingly.  A Little Chaos is less than the sum of its parts.

August 16: Sunset Song (2015 -- Terence Davies)

★★★★★

In another summer of superheroes, Sunset Song reminds us of other things that cinema can do.  Terence Davies brings as much big and showy to the screen as Zack Snyder, but he uses it to entirely different effect.  Sunset Song is a rich two hours that moves at the easy pace of reading with all the complexity that a novel can maintain.

Cinematic beauty fills the screen.  The actors are as handsome as fashion models and quaffed to perfection.  When we see Ewan Tavendale framed in a doorway with beads of mist condensing on his hair, we could be looking at an image from Vanity Fair.  Rich, wide landscapes punctuate the outdoors scenes, and interior shots are sparsely furnished and naturally lit, often as though from a soft single source.  And Davies softens the light with gauzy filters and uses backlighting that blends his subdued color palette even further.

Sunset Song’s camera also creates onscreen beauty.  In one shot, the camera starts with a closeup on the back of Chris Guthrie’s head as she washes her face from the edge of a small pond dock.  With the pond symmetrically laid out in the frame’s background, there’s a real beauty in this image.  But the camera begins to draw back to include more of the background and creates a different beauty as the composition changes before our eyes.  Chris becomes smaller and smaller, and the shot becomes one of a landscape.  Not only does the camera movement emphasize the theme of Chris’ oneness with the land, but there is a cinematic pleasure in watching such beauty unfold on the screen.   Davies’ camera moves in such purposeful ways throughout the film.  And in addition to camera movement, the angle of shots gives us imagery to appreciate.  One low shot fills the screen with tilled earth as a horse-drawn plow approaches from the top of the frame, and one high angle shot turns the locals into small figures on a large landscape.  Davies’ camera fully exploits the strength of the visual in cinema.

Beyond their beauty, such images contribute to the complexity of theme and character that informs Sunset Song.  Through the story of Chris Guthrie, the movie shows us the challenges facing a woman at the turn of the century.  Chris is bullied by her father and forced to do the demanding work of the farm, yet she lacks the opportunity her brother has of leaving the farm to try to live better elsewhere.  Her mother warns her of the limited choices she can expect as a woman before killing herself to avoid more bullying by her husband, and Chris raises eyebrows in her village by deciding to run the farm she inherits rather than marry.  The scenes of Chris in the landscape develop a second theme of the film – the way a connection to the land helps her stay strong in the face of all the trials she faces.  She emerges from the earth early in an early shot in the film and becomes one with it as Davies’ camera moves around her outdoors.  And the voiceover refers to her connection to the land many times, a connection that gives her not only strength but also transcendence, as though the land will give her knowledge and immortality rather than social institutions like government or religion.  The link between the visuals and the narration makes this theme especially strong.

And Sunset Song takes the time to create complex characters with subtlety.  Chris’ father is a terrible man, yet the movie gives us moments of sympathy for him as when we see him worry about providing for the family or when he is dying.  Chris’s brother loves his sister deeply yet leaves her to pursue his own goals.  And her eventual husband, Ewan Tavendale, starts as a loving husband and father but returns from WW I as an abusive spouse; his arc ends in a deeply poignant inversion when Ewan is executed by the state for desertion, an act that simultaneously affirms Chris’s reliance on the land as foundation of life and her skepticism of national institutions.  The film ends with a shot that pans the detritus of a grey battlefield from above in the same way we’ve previously seen the film pan a field of russet hay from above.  The contrast of the shots both expresses the film’s theme of the importance of an attachment to the land and shows us what has happened to Ewan as government has reached all to way to members of small farming communities.

The tight control and complexity of Sunset Song make watching this film a deeply pleasurable aesthetic experience.  It weaves its cinematic beauty and its themes into a unified whole in a way that other films of our action hero summer don’t.  Or, for that matter, than most films can.

August 10: Ex Machina (2015 -- Alex Garland)

★★★★

Very conversant with sci-fi, Alex Garland picks up some of its familiar memes here, modifies them and then blends them into a thought-provoking film.

Ava, for example, would fit into Blade Runner as yet another replicant who has developed consciousness.  In Ex Machina, she learns and she schemes in order to survive, though by the end of the film she has neither the aesthetic sensibility of a Roy nor the emotional range of a Rachel.  In Garland’s conception, Ava hasn’t arrived at human-like consciousness yet; instead, she’s an AI creation and intelligent thinker but functions mostly on the level of her survival instinct.  Garland’s shift in the conception of the android sets up the brutal climax of the film, though the very end suggests the possible future growth of a more human identity.

In addition to Blade Runner, Ex Machina draws from a line of movies that stretches from Island of Lost Souls through blockbusters like Jurassic Park.  As early as the Erle Kenton 1932 classic, a naïve outsider finds himself in an isolated environment with a threatening scientist as host.  Dr. Moreau and Nathan both manipulate this outsider in order to test their respective female creations, and the two scientists share the same ambition of rivaling god in their creations, an ambition they also share with relatives like Jurassic Park’s CEO and researcher, Dr. Hammond.  In terms of its general pattern, Ex Machina is very much a classic Hollywood horror story.

Garland’s achievement here is in taking this familiar story and these familiar characters and making something uniquely contemporary of them.  Nathan is a narcissistic, overbearing technology magnate.  He’s young but fabulously rich, and he’s doughy but pounds a punching bag for strength.  He eats healthy food and drinks choice alcohol amid his minimalist decor.  Verbally, he’s abrasive, pushy and arrogant, warping one of Caleb’s comments into a reference to his own godliness.  Sociopathic as he is, Nathan is only sympathetic when it enables him to manipulate Caleb.

Ex Machina provides this sociopath with contemporary tools for creating his android, and the film uses these elements to look at big ontological questions.  After a time at Nathan’s, Caleb begins to suspect that the scientist has created Ava using his own web searches and internet preferences, but Caleb also realizes that he’s responding to Ava even though he recognizes this artificiality and manipulation.  Though this dynamic, Ex Machina asks if identity itself is only a pattern of behavior and thus programmable and capable of manipulation.  This idea finds visual expression in the opening scene of the film when digital imagery is projected onto Caleb’s face, imagery that the film repeats when Caleb realizes that even Kyoko is an android.  As Caleb begins to lose his sense of what constitutes human identity, he eventually resorts to viciously cutting his own arm to reveal the blood and tissue inside it, an evident contrast to the clear plastic arms of Ava.  But after establishing his own human-ness in this way, Caleb nevertheless decides to help rescue Ava from her upcoming decommissioning.  Even though Caleb recognizes how Nathan has manipulated his own responses – and we later find out that Ava is doing the same -- Caleb decides to respond to the collection of his preferences that Ava is.  Though Caleb, Ex Machina proposes a vision of human identity as a pattern of behaviors and even implies that the major difference between the android and the human is flesh vs. synthetics.

In the film’s concluding scenes, we find that Ava has begun developing a more human identity but she has not yet completed the process.  Ava has enough awareness to want to survive, and we discover that she has been using Caleb’s inclinations in order to manipulate him into helping her escape.  But she has not developed sensibilities like altruism, and she leaves him to die in a concrete room after she has killed Nathan.  Before she leaves the house, she puts synthetic skin on her arms, an echo of Caleb’s earlier slashing, as a way to disguise her difference from the humanity she is about to join.  The very ending of the film suggests that Ava is prepared to continue the growth of her identity.  She decides to visit a complicated intersection she has earlier talked about with Caleb because she wants to experience the cacophony of sensory stimulation that humans deal with routinely.  The film, however, leaves her moral development unexplored.

Garland uses old sci-fi memes in Ex Machina, but he updates them to consider some of the same questions of being that that a lot of sci-fi addresses.  What is identity?  What is human?  Ex Machina is an incisive look at these questions, and it’s also a compelling story with interesting characters and engaging visuals.  It’s a worthy addition to the subgenre of conceptual science fiction.

August 8: What We Do in the Shadows (2014 -- Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi)

★★★★

This very funny mockumentary by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi gets its humor from satire at several levels.  One of the funniest is the way What We Do in the Shadows consistently pokes fun at familiar formal aspects of Direct Cinema documentary style.  A movie about vampire housemates in New Zealand, the film opens with Viago directly addressing the camera as he guides us around the rooms of house.  It’s almost like Little Edie taking us around Grey Gardens.  As the film progresses from this opening, we make eye contact with the subjects throughout.  And like the Maysles, Clement and Waititi foreground the filmmaking process.  At one point, Viago creates a loud mic noise as he tucks in a handkerchief, and at a later emotional moment, Vladislav lunges at the camera to cover the lens.  But not content to merely use these conventions in a satirical setting, Shadows goes on to satirize the very presence of the camera and crew.  The camera crew becomes the focus of a confrontation when they follow the vampires to the Unholy Masquerade Ball, and they’re even attacked by werewolves later in the film, an act that truly shows the involvement of the documentarians with their subject.   The writing and direction throughout Shadows, in its mockery of Direct Cinema conventions, satirizes how seriously the style takes itself.

The directors also get a lot of humor from the traditional comic trope of using an outsider viewpoint of the everyday.  The vampires here have to deal with a roommate who hasn’t done dishes…in five years…and the film cuts to a kitchen shot with stacks of blood-stained china.  When roommate tempers flare, these housemates shape shift and fly into the air.  They also have problems in their love lives, though these problems are unique: the object of Viago’s affection is a very old woman now because his servant sent his coffin to the wrong international destination, and Vladislav has lost some of his power because he’s still unsettled by his conflict with The Beast, who we later learn is a previous girlfriend.  We also watch them learn to use the internet, text, navigate the rivalries that arise in their friendships, and find ways to dig at each other.  Nick, for example, makes Jackie into a vampire to get at Deacon by taking away his familiar.

Clement and Waititi also get humor from vampire lore.  The silver locket his love has unwittingly chosen for him burns Viago when he puts it on, but he does so anyway as a testimony to their love.  When Peyter is exposed to sunlight and burns, there are several gags about a barbeque smell.  One witty sequence describes the problems of dressing for going out when you don’t have a reflection, and once you’re out, you can’t go into a club unless you’re invited in.  And there are more than a few references to Nosferatu.

What We Do in the Shadows is a very funny movie.  The humor doesn’t always aspire to grand statements or observation, but its incisive wit is a delight.  And the sponsorship of The New Zealand Documentary Board suggests there is even a worthwhile genre critique at the base of the film.