Aeon Flux (Karyn Kusama, 2005)

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domino harvey
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Aeon Flux (Karyn Kusama, 2005)

#1 Post by domino harvey » Mon Dec 30, 2013 3:46 pm

colinr0380 wrote:Aeon Flux the movie or the TV series? I haven't seen the movie yet, though it is yet another thing in my pile, but the TV series, especially the ten minute shorts, is fantastic.
I saw the Aeon Flux shorts as part of Liquid Television in the early 90s, every second of which terrified me and may be responsible for why I still don't care for animation as a genre! The movie's total nonsense, of course, but it was better and more fun than I expected-- it's about as nonsensical as anything else in the series, so claims of its infidelity are a bit ludicrous, but it works more often than not, if only as a stylish hot mess. Plus, you know, Charlize Theron in crazy skintight outfits (Wasn't that the tagline?)

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colinr0380
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Aeon Flux (Karyn Kusama, 2005)

#2 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Dec 30, 2013 7:24 pm

domino harvey wrote:I saw the Aeon Flux shorts as part of Liquid Television in the early 90s, every second of which terrified me and may be responsible for why I still don't care for animation as a genre! The movie's total nonsense, of course, but it was better and more fun than I expected-- it's about as nonsensical as anything else in the series, so claims of its infidelity are a bit ludicrous, but it works more often than not, if only as a stylish hot mess. Plus, you know, Charlize Theron in crazy skintight outfits (Wasn't that the tagline?)
I must admit that I think I picked up the film mainly through curiosity at seeing Frances McDormand in a crazy sci-fi outfit! But Charlize Theron in the Aeon costume shouldn't be too hard to bear!

I picked up the DVD of the Aeon Flux series at around the same time and while I found the half hour series a bit lacking in comparison, I absolutely love the couple minute shorts. I didn't think that anything could top the first 'series' of shorts that build into one long story, but the second series of one-off shorts was amazing, thought provoking, blackly comic and disturbing in equal measure. I especially love the way that Aeon is constantly being undermined as an action heroine (which might play into why I haven't tackled the live action movie yet, as I guess I have presumed that she is going to come out on top just by the nature of the production!).

I think my favourite of the shorts would have to be Tide, which takes the form of a series of about thirty or so shots shown from fixed camera positions that get repeated six times as the characters travel down a lift which is stopping at every floor. It is a great short showing a constant cycle of action yet showing variations in action that starts off very proscribed and subtle only to increase and begin to break down as characters begin to assert themselves and end up not being in the correct position to be captured by the camera (or alternatively the one empty shot of the lift doors opening suddenly gets a character put into it!) and leads to a surprisingly funny, yet incredibly bleak conclusion!

I could not find a link to the actual short, but here is an "ediT" someone has made putting all of the single camera shots from each level together in bunches rather than playing one whole cycle of shots and then repeating from the beginning again, as in the original. It still kind of works!

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domino harvey
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#3 Post by domino harvey » Mon Dec 30, 2013 8:03 pm

colinr0380 wrote:I must admit that I think I picked up the film mainly through curiosity at seeing Frances McDormand in a crazy sci-fi outfit!
Wait til you see her hairstyle (and Pete Postlethwaite' lack thereof)! And my sentence construction was a bit unclear, but it was Liquid Television in toto that unnerved me so (and still does-- I tried watching an episode on YouTube not long ago and man, I practically had PTSD)-- the show definitely matches up with what I remembered from the series, even though I know the creator was unhappy with the live action version. It does open with the infamous shot of the fly in Aeon's eye, so right away there's some attempt at reconciling the source with the feature film adaptation, however bonkers that may end up (and it is very bonkers indeed). Unbelievably I think we're about to have an Aeon Flux thread once a Mod for this forum sees this and moves it to New Films...

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Gregory
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#4 Post by Gregory » Mon Dec 30, 2013 8:15 pm

It does open with the infamous shot of the fly in Aeon's eye, so right away there's some attempt at reconciling the source with the feature film adaptation, however bonkers that may end up (and it is very bonkers indeed).
Yeah, Aeon trapping a fly in her eyelashes is a textbook case of something that works well in its original animated setting but comes across as ridiculous when carried over to live action. I'm sitting there thinking, why would the fly fly right into her eye and this is just silly.

I'm not sure there's ever been a good adaptation of anything in really stylized animation to live action. (Ghost World survived the transition from comics because the source material was relatively realistic.)

And "props" to Liquid Television for being, along with Beavis and Butthead, one of only a couple examples of consistently worthwhile programming in the entire history of MTV.
Last edited by Gregory on Mon Dec 30, 2013 8:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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domino harvey
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#5 Post by domino harvey » Mon Dec 30, 2013 8:21 pm

Gregory wrote: Aeon trapping a fly in her eyelashes is a textbook case of something that works well in its original animated setting but comes across as ridiculous when carried over to live action. I'm sitting there thinking, why would the fly fly right into her eye and this is just silly.
Which is a fair reaction to the movie. It is brazenly silly, almost daring the viewer to laugh at it in derision, but I thought its stylistic boldness at least set it apart from other dozy adaptations of popular properties (Resident Evil, for instance) and I kinda admired its wrongheadedness and willingness to embrace its goofiness without acknowledging the inherent camp value in what it's doing

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Gregory
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#6 Post by Gregory » Mon Dec 30, 2013 8:29 pm

willingness to embrace its goofiness without acknowledging the inherent camp value
But isn't that a real contradiction? I often notice in action blockbusters a sincere tone of "lookit how fucking awesome this is" while some viewers (the kind like us on this forum, I guess) tend to attribute some measure of self-awareness to the ridiculousness of it.

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Re: On deciding what to watch

#7 Post by domino harvey » Mon Dec 30, 2013 8:36 pm

Perhaps! I only barely liked it and not enough to really recommend it to any but the most open-minded, so I'm not compelled to stick my neck too far out in its favor. The sheer volume of stylistic weirdness probably could be read as unintentionally awful (and was by most critics at least), but I still have a certain fondness for it. I can't think of any other action films I've seen that comes close to the bizarre excesses here, though-- not even John McClane or Jason Bourne on his worst day fought killer grass, a blimp, and a woman with hands for feet!

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Re: On deciding what to watch

#8 Post by Jean-Luc Garbo » Mon Dec 30, 2013 8:49 pm

domino harvey wrote:I can't think of any other action films I've seen that comes close to the bizarre excesses here, though-- not even John McClane or Jason Bourne on his worst day fought killer grass, a blimp, and a woman with hands for feet!
The World's End did that as a gag.

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Re: Aeon Flux (Karyn Kusama, 2005)

#9 Post by colinr0380 » Tue Dec 31, 2013 7:02 am

That fits in with what I remember from the animated series too - I think the woman with hands instead of feet was introduced in the series as being able to do monkey swings and punch at the same time with the extra grippers! The original series is full of blackly comic, slightly twisted events going on in a brutally callous world (given the way that our anti-heroine is in a kind of 'will they-won't they' symbiotic relationship with Trevor the main bad guy that literally spans time and space at a couple of points, and which all of the callow and naïve secondary hero characters keep trying to screw up through their do-gooding!)

It is a world set up in the first couple of seasons of shorts where our heroine suffers multiple horrific deaths (especially in the shorts!) but anticipating Kenny in South Park keeps on coming back for more next week! Where the mind is tortured by being trapped inside a particular body, or stuck inside a closed system of control (political, sexual, religious) without any chance of escape or exploration - one of the best episodes of the half hour series is where Aeon spies on Trevor who has perfected a cloning device and decides to clone herself so that she can go to Trevor and finally experience the forbidden pleasure of a sexual relationship with the evil mastermind while also keeping herself 'pure' (this is also the one with the lady with hands for feet, I think!). She and the clone start off on the same path (after having a rather erotic kiss goodbye!) but their experiences diverge more and more from the point of the clone's creation. Fulfilling the unrequited relationship is something that eventually leads the 'real' Aeon down her path of tragic destruction - a dead end on the narrative possibility paths for the character - leaving only the oblivious to those events, fresh clone behind to become the real Aeon and carry on her original spy work. It is one of the sadder and more thought provoking ways that the series found to show Aeon meeting her death.

The series is full of those philosophical ideas - the other great half-hour one involves a factory worker trying to cross the border between the two fictional countries, not realising until too late that the machines she has been toiling on have been increased border security devices that traps and medically amputates any part of the body that passes into 'unauthorised space'! It is incredibly tragic with, as Peter Chung says in his commentary, real world border inspirations and ideas (the objects we work on end up enslaving us) taken to dystopian sci-fi lengths.

I'd definitely highly recommend the animated series - the first two seasons of shorts are much more action based (and critique those action tropes) and then, again according to the commentary, the half hour series, due to violence concerns by MTV, moves much more into a strangely abstracted sexual territory for its moments of transgression (weird and never-before-seen practices, such as 'tonging' a lady's spinal gap(!)), and much more relationship material mostly between Aeon and Trevor but usually paralleled by our 'callow and naïve couple of the week' who can be totally transformed or destroyed by the main events of the particular episode.

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Re: Pre-2000s Television on Blu-ray

#10 Post by domino harvey » Mon Nov 12, 2018 3:08 pm

The complete animated series of Aeon Flux is apparently coming to Blu next year from Paramount

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