#luc besson

Watching me & my brother, Jeffrey(RIP), favorite childhood movie as I listen to Billy Porter “Show Me” on Alexa to enjoy my Saturday night.

Such a classic “The Fifth Element”! Full of acting legends such as Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman, Chris Tucker, Ian Holm(RIP), Luke Perry(RIP), & Milla Jovovich🖤

this post will positively (and also realistically) discuss luc besson, the wachowski sisters, george lucas, paul verhoeven, neill blomkamp, and alejandro jodorowsky.

this post will negatively (and also realistically) discuss quentin tarantino, david lynch, guillermo del toro, christopher nolan, greta gerwig, the coen brothers, and mel brooks.

there are pros and cons to every one of these artists’ work, and there are pros i prize more heavily and cons i find more problematic. i don’t necessarily like every movie made by directors i like or dislike every movie by directors i don’t. with this context out of the way, let’s begin!

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luc besson has an incredible ability to love his inspirations so much that when he puts them to screen he captures with exact precision all of their best qualities, and all the changes he makes are to make the story and visuals more emotional and more fun. he is a terrible man to women and girls, and this can spill over onto the screen in ways such as his tendency to cast models. but he can adapt/write a woman who has so much to teach a man, who leads an initiative to victory, who has her own desires and deserves them, etc, etc, etc. and he will put her in a beautiful outfit in a beautiful room and she will belong there. THIS is THE space opera director to me. he made bram stoker’s dracula feel like space opera. he adapted the valérian and laureline comics like he breathed them; across multiple movies he is completely in touch with the vastness of every world and the morality at the heart of every story and character - morality that to him is worth trust, sacrifice, love.

he is not always original and he is not always willing to place the thoughtfulness that social justice and social justice movements deserve over his desire to make a scene more colorful and more energetic. but he will not fail at that second part, and he is brave enough to execute it even when there will be a monetary loss.

i’ll discuss christopher nolan next. instead of casting on the basis of who will look good in his movie, he casts a whole lot of famous people, some of whom don’t even look like they’re in the right genre some of the time. he is praised for his visuals by a variety of people, while luc besson’s skills are much more unnoticed in america at least, despite besson outclassing nolan in this category to an embarrassing degree. nolan makes overly-stylized, beige movies about perfect men, and besson makes creative and passionate movies about flawed men who are genuinely in love. audiences would rather watch a man succeed than watch a man fail, even if the man who is failing is the only one of the two written to have feelings.

this actually brings me to david lynch. i’d like to talk about blue velvet specifically and also the type of woman lynch may favor depicting in general, and what is so degrading about the way he does it. because blue velvet does have flawed men who have feelings - and the women they abuse are either suicidal, so broken they can only think to fuck the first man who walks through the door, or naive, so young they can only think to fuck the first man who walks through the door. and yeah, that happens in real life. but the movie isn’t about why that happens, or why it’s bad. the movie tries to tell you it cares about a woman’s plight, but in failing to care about the societal context, and in failing to care about the value of having standards for your sexual or romantic partners, what the movie actually seems to care about is how wild and daydreamy a time it would be to have a suicidal woman threaten you with a knife. that’s infinitely more offensive than putting laureline in a bikini, and the most artful cover-up i’ve ever seen in my entire life, and having her help valerian review for the mission because he couldn’t be bothered to do it himself. because that happens in real life, too. but instead of the emphasis being solely on the fact that there’s a part of laureline that needs valerian, the emphasis is also on the fact that she has skills and goals that he doesn’t have, and that she’s going to ask him to get on her level whether he thinks it’s hot or not.

a crime movie and a space opera are of course not the same thing. but if your movie is going to have coercion, as both blue velvet and valerian and the city of a thousand planets proudly do, then at least let it happen to someone who is a full person with wants beyond her immediate impulses.

i think it’s the right time to talk about neill blomkamp now. nolan and lynch have both made movies with visuals and scenes that are meant to make the audience truly feel the situations the characters are in. but it can come across as raw yet un-detailed. blomkamp, who has set multiple movies about aliens or robots in south africa, intertwining that setting and all that can be learned from real injustice with ideas about how humanity’s worst impulses could play out in the future, has a talent for realistic gore and filming techniques that give the impression of watching what’s unfolding live. and part of this is the human aspect, even if the character in question isn’t literally human - he’s able to depict moments of weakness and fear that have style without being too clean, and invention without feeling meaninglessly obscure. and he’s writing with a purpose greater than depicting a famous man, greater than depicting a woman who the world broke in a way that turns the audience into voyeurs - he’s writing to turn a mirror towards all humanity.

now to more briefly add some thoughts about the coen brothers and mel brooks, and their tendency towards unserious-ness, even though serious things may be happening in the movie: i think capturing a sense of gravity in a movie can be very important depending on the subject matter, and very hard to do because it can be so much about context. a fun movie can have gravity; a vague movie can have gravity; a movie full of wacky people can have gravity. what gets in the way of gravity is choosing to display only the superficial aspects of something; what gets in the way of gravity is refusing to hold characters accountable; what gets in the way of gravity is injecting beauty or whimsy into a scene that doesn’t have an emotional core.

discussions of an underlying emotional core bring me to jodorowsky. if ever a man deserved to be pretentious, it would be him. if ever a man deserved to cast himself as a spiritual guide and speak directly to the audience at the end of a movie, the man who can turn concepts, beliefs, and morals into visceral, painful, beautiful imagery, defining characters by their sins to prove points in the moment, not just to give a general air across the entire runtime, making characters suffer for a reason, for their own benefit even, ultimately concluding that reality is something more important than anything else and worth our time - this is that man!!!

let’s bring in starship troopers now. verhoeven has made multiple incredible sci-fi movies and multiple incredible movies in general, but it’s what he did with starship troopers that i’d like to use to express what i love about him. he took a story about a fascist military, and without ever sacrificing the sense of brotherhood between those fighting side by side, or the power of an understanding yet unapologetic leader, or the pride to be found in gaining confidence as a young person, he shows the audience exactly what these heroes are really doing - they are participating in an initiative to invalidate the humanity and rights of a species they don’t actually understand, and they and everyone else are being deliberately and explicitly manipulated to do it.

to me, a movie should go out of its way to express and depict what is important to it. sure, some movies are just for fun (i myself love rom-coms and respect that not every movie-watching experience is to learn something), but i think a movie does stop being just for fun when it is depicting or adapting something more serious than it, and then it has a responsibility to use the art form to comment. audiences getting a general sense that something may be a theme, as if playing connections, isn’t the same as a movie actually provably having that theme in its character interactions, visuals, or anything else.

tarantino is the only director i’m discussing today who i am unwilling to watch any other movies by. pulp fiction remains the worst competently-executed movie i’ve ever seen. it displays the worst of humanity - normalized racism, normalized drug abuse, normalized making other people clean up your irresponsibility - and instead of condemning any of these things, the film actively enjoys them and chooses to condemn violence instead. it gleefully refuses to not have fun with active racism and self-destructive behaviors and fails to meaningfully connect them to violence. it is ignorant, not out of love for other things that it wanted to depict, but out of the high of hate.

greta gerwig, on the other hand, is passionate about fostering understanding, particularly for women. my critiques of her are critiques towards someone who may share more of my real life standards of behavior than some others on this list, including some others whose art i love. but i am talking about movies and movies alone in this post, and whether or not i think they capture the world, offer up a true perspective on it, take it seriously. nuance is not required to make a good movie, and bad movies can have much nuance. however, perhaps nuance would be beneficial when making a movie such as barbie. barbie is a movie about the different experience that women and men can have. it’s a movie about the way the systems of our world are structured. it’s a movie about what it feels like to be a woman. i am a woman, and i didn’t quite relate. i have also noticed that some women of color and/or women of older generations did not relate as much. perhaps greta gerwig, as would be understandable, is best equipped to talk about experiences she herself can relate to. i had to turn off ladybird part of the way through when i tried to watch it, because the world of its white female main character was simply too shallow for me to be interested in; scene after scene we saw through the eyes of someone who was more inexperienced in some ways than i have ever personally been, and the movie as a whole didn’t do anything to make up for that.

in the barbie movie, barbie is really disinterested in ken, which is a valid experience. but so much of being a woman is contending with loving (whether or not it’s romantic) men, or relying on men for whatever reason. we all share this world, and the conclusion for barbie land at the end of the movie is that barbies rule and men actually hate being in power. but in real life men don’t hate having privilege - especially invisible privileges. no one with any kind of privilege doesn’t benefit from it, that’s by definition what it is. i think feminist movies can be stronger if they’re able to take into account a wider scope of female experiences, including those that may be more grounded and less aspirational.

george lucas is an inspiration. and i’m not talking about george lucas when the actors are re-writing lines and someone else is directing. i’m talking about george lucas when he told hayden christiansen to be more whiny and gave his character a virgin birth and a high m-count. i’m talking about a man with a vision, an interest in politics, a message for kids.

my two main issues with del toro are that 1. to humanize monsters he makes them morally perfect and most of all that 2. he sees death as a mercy/something that can offer its own positives. george lucas made the main character across his two trilogies a villain who had a son. he was a man terrified of death after personally witnessing it. and the moral of the story isn’t that he was wrong to desire supernatural abilities, but that he was wrong to kill for them - and wrong to live a life in fear. discussions of death require having this life to them.

i have in many ways saved the best for last: the wachowski sisters. no one does space opera like luc besson, but jupiter ascending has three siblings with three different complex relationships with their late mother (and they all have palaces or lavish ships too), a bureaucracy montage, and its main male character in eyeliner. and despite jupiter ascending being in my favorite sub-genre, it’s only my third favorite sci-fi movie of theirs - cloud atlas and speed racer are both some of the greatest movies of all time that i would recommend to literally anyone. the wachowski’s know how to make a heartfelt, powerful movie that is also fun and palatable, and those things are never in opposition - there is a perfect harmony between the audience’s enjoyment and the movie’s ideals, weird characters, and unique artistic choices. the art of speed racer could have revolutionized film.

Oh boy, I'd forgotten what a mess of a film it was.

Luc Besson is certainly a troubling figure when it comes to his work off the screen and has quite often been a disappointing figure on screen, too, but there are many films made earlier in his career that are noteworthy. He made a number of key contributions to the fascinating Cinema du Look through the 1980s and 1990s, a movement which saw filmmakers completely prioritise visual stylisation over…

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