1900

Saw 1900, a film about Italy and fascism. It follows the fate of two boys, one born to a wealthy landowner and the other born to a clan of peasants. The peasant boy, Olmo, is of uncertain parentage thus cementing him as the true son of the soil. Indeed, he claims he listens to his missing father in wells and bottles and in telegraph poles. The other child, Alfredo, is chubby and a little spoiled. We establish the two as friends that their friendship may stand for the brotherhood of man in the coming conflict, which is framed almost entirely as a class conflict.

This film is squarely on the side of the peasants which is to say the socialists (at first anyway. There's nuance.) At first, in the pre-war pseudo-feudal times, the peasants fight back by passively suffering at the landowner. He is disgusted by them and by their suffering and this strategy is almost totally ineffective but leads to one fairly freaky scene of a farmer mutilating himself as an act of protest. Soon however, the fascists are on the rise. Fascism is personified by Attila, the ghastly head of security at the farm, played powerfully by Donald Sutherland. He establishes himself as a horrible character by gruesomely killing what he deems to be a 'parasitical' cat. Dead cats make more appearances and seem to symbolize the upper class; beautiful, but lazy.

The rich kid meanwhile is trying to escape all of this with his decadent art-dealer uncle who spends most of his time floating through fancy hotels, indulging in cocaine and in pictures of picturesque arrangements of naked young men. The uncle introduces Alfredo to a beautiful, wild woman who drives fast cars, makes scenes at parties, and writes futurist poetry. She of course symbolizes art and hates the fascists who are by this point squat men with squat clubs who ride around in trucks, hassling the poor folk. She is established as an irrelevant flibbertigibbet who is nonetheless useful to us viewers as a voice of judgement.

The film finally ends with the worst excesses of cruelty by Attila-the-fascist and the sudden glorious liberation of Italy by the communists. By this point, the film has accomplished its goal. The film opens with the final communist revolution. We witness teenage boys merrily holding old men at gunpoint and see an old and a well-dressed couple murdered with pitchforks. We then flash back to see how we got to this point. What repulsed us at first now pleases us: the well-dressed couple was Attila and his equally-ghastly wife. The orgy of celebration at the end of the film is dampened when, at the end of the day, as the sun is going down, the communist partisans demand that the peasants turn in their guns to the state. An ominous ending to an already difficult period in Italy's history.

The film is epic. It's five hours long and takes its time. There are no tedious or indulgent drawn-out scenes, merely a lot of stuff happening for five hours. It's also a difficult film to watch. For all the playful joy of the boys wrestling and play-fighting, what I'll remember most from this film is the animals being slaughtered, the peasants being shot, and the ghastly image of Donald Sutherland receiving a blowjob while he rants about his fascist dystopia. Joking aside, there's a lot of animal cruelty in this film. It has the feel of a medieval story, earthily unconcerned with the realities of meat production and more concerned with the human spirit. How power corrupts and how the poor are exploited again and again. The film has no illusions about the reign of the communists. It is guilty of assuming some saintliness of the poor, but I think this is a weakness I'll allow it. An epic film, moving and beautiful. I recommend it (if you can stand the run-time.)

Dogtown and Z-Boys

Saw Dogtown and Z-Boys, a documentary about the very early days of skateboarding. True to subject matter, it's full of jump-cuts and classic rock, pictures of cool bad boys standing in front graffiti fly and whirl by as aging dudes shot in black and white talk about their glory days. Every so often the action pauses for an ironic interlude. "Dogtown will be right back" the film informs us before playing a cameo one of the kids had on Charlie's Angels. It's a sweet, stylish hagiography of one bunch of kids known as the "Z boys" (even though there was one girl) who influenced the style and technique of skateboarding.

The film is a love letter to the time, the place, the people, just everything skating. It's an overwhelming collage of sound and image. I really really want to talk about the kids' self-described "broken" home lives here. I want to talk about how their whole image was manufactured by some journalist/artist dude working under a variety of pseudonyms, but it just feels mean to focus on these things. Most of the film is bright and fast and overwhelming. It has no drama or conflict, and is only interested in telling the various rags-to-riches stories of a bunch of almost-homeless kids rising to Xtreme sport wealth and fame. The kids (now adults) don't even have anything mean to say about each other. It's so cheery I almost want to make snide comments in self defense.

This film is clearly shot through the eyes of some star-struck fan, just delighted to breathe the same air as these god-people who dared to skate a board! The enthusiasm is infectious, but don't expect to learn very much about these people, people in general, the commercialization of alternative subcultures, or about the world in general. The very subjects of the film remain opaque apart from a cut and dry "this guy represented this company, this girl won that prize" kind of way. One guy shuts down a very tentative probe into his childhood home life. There's also the myth-making talk of "inventing" and "revolutionizing" "everything" but this is kind of winning, in it's starry-eyed little way. A cute, punky little brother of a film.

Superman

Saw the 1978 version of Superman (thanks, Chris!) It was pretty good. It opens with neon credits against a backdrop of space. The letters swoosh by us, trailing light and rumbling the base, as though they were titanic object flying by us at tremendous speed. This is a blockbuster from the time when they were new, trying hard to evoke the sweep and opera of Star Wars, but also trying to stay true to its roots as a dime-store comic. The result is basically good, but very mixed.

Take, for example, the scene where Superman flies with Lois Lane. She is terrified at first, but slowly, taken with the wonder of actually flying, she begins to trust him and relax into his arms. This is such a great and beautiful metaphor for love and then they go and 70's it all up with a spoken-word poem that contains the couplet "You can fly / you belong to the sky." Ugh. There's a lot that's great here, but there's a lot of comic-book-y camp as well. Some of the camp is even good camp. At one point Superman is cheerily assuring Lois that no politician would lie. That's classic starry-eyed Supes! Perfect! The mincing, shouty Lex Luthor and his bumbling assistant... not so much.

On the whole it was a good film. It does very little explaining and, even for being two and a half hours, is told at a breathless, breakneck pace. It opens with his Kryptonian father putting General Zod into space-jail for heaven's sake. Nowadays this would be three films and an HBO show, and as it should be. There's a ton of story going on here and it's all very entertaining and exciting, but even so I wish it had taken its time a bit more. Also, of course there's the bad science (just turn the Earth backward!) and, I'm sorry to admit it, but Fleischer Lois is the only true Lois for me.

Shame

Saw Shame, a drama about sex addiction, although it's really most interested in the title character: shame. The protagonist is this James Bond-type dude with a gorgeous minimalist apartment in Manhattan. He has a six pack, douche-y friends, and some job where everyone walks around in dress shirts and pressed slacks. He skulks around this world of glass and money maintaining strict politeness and professionalism. His only source of amusement comes from pornography, but even this he consumes compulsively, joylessly. He has a deep and terrible problem with any kind of intimacy. Possibly he has sexualized all forms of intimacy, rendering casual friendships kind of creepy, or possibly emotional problems drove him to obsessively pursue physical intimacy, but whether the chicken or the egg came first, he remains alone and at sea in New York, the city that sleeps alone.

The protagonist's sister shows up wanting to reconnect and needing help of some vague type. She tries with increasing desperation to connect with him but if he can't handle casual friendships, he sure can't handle familial ones and things get scary in his apartment pretty fast. He reacts to her overtures with frustration, shouting, and physical violence. At one point he throws her on the sofa, squeezing her shoulders, while she giggles and shrieks and does everything she can to make this situation into something where he isn't just beating her up. It's a deeply sad and scary scene.

The poignancy of their relationship and of the film is that he cannot help her because he needs too much help himself. He cannot talk about this with anyone due to the crushing shame of addiction made worse by the embarrassing nature of his vice. A man addicted to sex? The jokes write themselves. This is also not at all a sexy film. It treats sex the way Leaving Las Vegas treats drinking. There is no upbeat beginning to the addiction. We're past that and into the self-destruction phase of the addiction. We hope that the protagonist can pull out of his nose-dive, but can see he is beginning a speedy descent.

The film uses some very edgy material to address familiar themes or addiction and alienation. These are deep and difficult topics however, and the film gorgeously shot and unfolds almost poetically, via knowing glances and symbols and games. It's a very pretty, very sad film.

Edit: this film also contains kind of homophobic attitudes, btw. The protagonist's lowest moment, wherein he completely gives way to his addiction, is in a gay club which is also literally the only time gay people are shown. This is using homosexuality as a stand-in for depravity and unchecked lust and that's kind of a shitty thing. Very pretty film though.

Sympathy for Mr Vengeance

Saw Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, the second in Chan-wook Park's revenge trilogy. This one follows a deaf and dumb man who is taking care of his ailing sister who needs a kidney transplant. He can find neither funds nor donors and is even cheated by some back-alley organ thieves. Eventually, he and his anarchist girlfriend come up with a kidnapping scheme where they take the toddler daughter of the deaf guy's boss. This scheme gets further and further out of control. The film starts off as a kind of wacky black comedy and winds up in a very ugly and unhappy place indeed.

The descent from wicked but lighthearted comedy to gruesome, dismal blood and guts is purposeful, I think. Vengeance brings happiness to no one in this film and there's so much revenge had. It taints the characters more and more as they commit ever more fully to extracting eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. When one character finally gets his revenge on another, he says "I know you're a good guy... but you know why I have to kill you." This isn't a bad-ass moment, just the period at the end of a long, rambling, downward-inflected sentence.

I enjoyed the film a good deal. It's fairly grim, but I could handle it, and there's amazing, beautiful scenes sprinkled throughout, often in the midst of the worst torments. One character holds up his shirt and slices at his abdomen with a razor blade. We close up on his wounds, leaking blood, as he drops his shirt again, the crisp white slowly turning red in long streaks. Eerie and repulsive and beautiful. We then cut to a reaction shot and the whole thing becomes absurd and silly. What a difficult and delightful film.

Day of Wrath (1943)

Saw Day of Wrath, a black and white Danish film set during the witch hunts. It open with an old woman being hunted and caught. She is questioned by one of the more major characters: an aging priest who has recently re-married to a woman who is even young than his handsome, adult son from the previous marriage. He has spared his wife's mother, who was also accused of witchery, but now condemns this old woman. With her dying breath, she curses him.

This is very ominous, but only if you accept the idea that she is, in fact, possessed of magical powers. The film contains a few other instances of witches (or people who claim to be witches) and often they seem to have magical powers. There's enough trouble brewing what with the young wife and hot son, never mind magical curses and so on. The idea that these vulnerable, old, hunted women do actually have some means of revenge is appealing, but it makes the witch-hunters, well, right. There's a very grim scene early on where a panel of dudes in black cloaks and ridiculous white ruffs torture a "confession" out of the old woman. She just dazedly answers yes to all of their prompts and they soberly and seriously note it down as "a fine confession." The hypocrisy is palpable, but then again her curse seems to have an effect.

Well, on the other hand, the magic in this film is all magical realism so the evil priest's life does become hell, but only by the prosaic means of his wife and son inevitably canoodling. (There's a scene, by the way, where the wife is embroidering an image of a young woman. She pauses in her work to gaze at the hot son, through the mesh of the fabric, and it appears that the embroidered woman is holding the pin and piercing the son's heart. I noticed, film. I noticed.)

Overall The film is a claustrophobic, airless drama, full of stuffy christian attitudes versus sexily lax morals. The film is a morality play from top to bottom, using the witchery to only denote who is seductively bad and who is uprightly moral. It's very dramatic, but it's values, woof.

Our Daily Bread

Saw Our Daily Bread, a documentary about the industrial food industry. As you might guess from the title and subject matter, it does get a bit moralistic sometimes, but it's not too heavy-handed. Rather, it evokes the Quatsi films of Godfrey Reggio, being wordless and composed almost entirely of composed still shots and slow zooms and pans. The thesis-making shot of the film, I feel, is the one from the poster. A man in a lab coat is standing in a hallway of what could be refrigerators or airlocks to deep space. He moves a cart larger than he is into frame. We know it must contain something edible, but don't know what. Corn? Bread? No, it's baby chicks. The adorable and ambulatory are treated no differently than, say, a pile of laundry. Just another thing to transport and put through some process. They aren't shown (right now) being beheaded or having their wings clipped or any other discomfort, but they are being treated with supreme and absolute indifference. Fair warning if you're sensitive about this sort of thing: I'm going to talk about meat production.

The scene with the chicks is immediately followed by a crop duster eerily unfolding its arms, getting longer and longer, like a praying mantis. Later on, we are in a salt mine which is vast, dark, and echoing, looking more like the moon than like anything terrestrial. There are machines with pseudopod-like appendages which are designed to shake the nuts off of trees. This is a world of robots and arcane design. A world so seemingly alien that questions of compassion or humanity seem irrelevant. Human workers are often shown, often eating on a lunch break. This is thematic but also renders the humans almost as automatic as the machinery that surrounds them. They are just more expensive machines.

I was totally fascinated with the bizarre machinery and techniques of mass, automated butchery. At one point a human is sucking viscera out of a pig's corpse using a vacuum cleaner. At one point fish are being gutted by a machine with the precise movements of an insect or a bird. It's fascinating but of course it's discomforting and repulsive to watch as well. Indeed, in one scene we see a cow fight very earnestly to not be killed, but is doomed, has of course been doomed since birth. The film is really best suited to starting discussions, I think. The meat production will stick with you the longest and is course very unsettling but there's also wax papers, cucumbers, and even a funny little scene where a worker is walking down a row of egg-laying hens, their heads peering out at him and pulling back en masse when he moves his hands towards them. There's also the workers themselves and a discussion of globalism to be had. Notice how they're never eating the food they're producing. I wonder also if there is meant to be a parallel drawn here between the workers and the animals? At any rate a very interesting film if you're willing to put up with some blood.

Master of the Flying Guillotine

Saw Master of the Flying Guillotine (thanks, J!) It was solid gold schlock. It's a kung-fu film about an evil blind monk who is trying to kill a one-armed boxer who is our hero because he's our hero. The blind monk is armed with a razor-blade-veiled hat which beheads people (it is the titular Flying Guillotine.) To deepen the confusion, there is a fighting tournament going on with non-knife-using fighters, and villainous foreigners from Thailand (kickboxing expert) and India (expert in yoga and also in making his arms stretch really long.) Filmed in the 70s, the film is shot in some grainy, muddy-colored film stock that looks like it's been found in a mud puddle. the soundtrack is full of incongruous heavy guitars and synth music, with the wicked foreigners having their own, ethnically inspired, themes. This, ladies and gentlemen, this is schock, this is camp, this is grindhouse.

This film also inspired Tarantino who, say what else you will about him, is a magpie of great taste. The film is a genuine so-bad-it's-good film. In fact, it's not even that bad, so much as delightfully bewildering. Take, for example, the barely-explicable swastika the blind monk wears. Consider also the impractical and ridiculous braided-hair-style fighting on display at one point. Moments of marvelous confusion and outrageous bad-assery are everywhere in this film. At one point some dude is walking barefoot on the points of swords. Swords, man. At one point the hero walks on the ceiling and it's never mentioned again. Amazing, amazing schlock.

This is a party film. Amazing, stupid, hilarious, delightful. My friends can look forward to being subjected to this film in the future!

Warrior

Saw Warrior, a boxing film that swapped out MMA for boxing, but of course it makes very little difference what the precise mode of combat is. The central story is about two brothers, both sons of an abusive alcoholic father who is now in AA and trying to make amends. The two brothers are fighting in the biggest MMA tourney in the woooooorld. They are both not on speaking terms with each other, and are both on barely-speaking terms with their father, who is one of the brothers' coach. They both have backgrounds that they're fighting for, one to keep his house from being foreclosed upon, and the other for reasons which are explained but are sort of mysterious. Leave it to say they're very noble. And then, on the night of the great fight, as everyone watches, one of the brothers is hit by a mac truck and dies. Nah, just joking, they totally beat the cathartic shit out of each other.

This is a very masculine movie. Being a not particularly masculine dude, I found it silly and kind of insulting. The one brother is almost constantly glowering and silent. This is supposed to come off as strong and brooding, but there are other adjectives one could use, such as petulant or sulky. The other brother is more open and is kind of more of the hero of the film, but he doesn't exactly treat his wife very well (as long as I'm picking nits.) The few speaking female characters are fairly one-dimensional. The wife who is not treated well begs her husband not to gamble his health for money. I completely sympathize with this argument because it could be very expensive if he's paralyzed from the neck down or something but her husband wrinkles his brow and I guess this dismisses this complaint. The brothers and father are uber-butch Men who can only connect by means of pain and self-destruction. The film kind of knows this (the father listens constantly to Moby Dick, in a sort of hat-tip) but if you're not paying close attention, you could easily miss these notes of sanity in a sea of awesome scissor locks and smackdowns.

All of that said, this is a very moving film. It's filled with nationalism, chest-pounding, apple-cheeked children, blond skinny wives, and weeping violins scattered liberally across the whole soundtrack. I felt fairly hostile toward it for the duration of the film, and even I was moved by it. The film is like eating a greasy burger. It's not refined, it's probably bad for you, but it activates the sensors in your lizard brain and feels great. If you ever do want to hate-watch it though, then I recommend you imagine that the father raped his sons and that that's why they hate him.

Memories of Murder

Saw Memories of Murder, a Korean crime film. It's apparently based on a real-life string of murders of women in rural Korea. The film is a sort-of buddy cop film where a slick big-city investigator is sent out to help the country bumpkins who are cute and personable but also very intent on closing the case, even if it means beating confessions out of suspects. This leads to a lot of false confessions, dead ends, and muddied waters. There's some little friction between the big-city dude and his small-town counterpart which is all wrapped up by the end of the film.

The ending of the film was very surprising to me. I'll spoil it here in white font if you're interested: the murderer is never caught and the mystery is never solved. If you do care about spoilers, of course I can't tell you about the ending, but have no fear: it's not all that shocking, just unexpected for what is otherwise a totally straightforward crime procedural.

The film also does some very interesting things with the country-cousin-cop. He claims to have a miraculous ability to read guilt in people's faces. He "proves" that he has this power a few times but each time the film lets us know that he's only hiding a clever observation. This proclaimed ability allows him to simply declare a man guilty and to rationalize the ensuing beatings-motivated confession. The theme of the film seems to be the frustration and injustice caused by petty corruption.

So okay, but did I like it? Unfortunately not really, no. I found it pretty drab and uninteresting. It's not bad, mind you, just a cop film. I've seen cop films before, this was not much different. Dead ends, clever realizations, thrilling chases, the same old same old. I didn't detect any deep themes about the human condition or anything. It's just a pleasant little waste of time. A bit of a miss for me alas, but not a bad film by any means.

Kiss Me Deadly

Saw Kiss Me Deadly, a fairly chilly 50s noir. It's a rare film that clearly has influenced both David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino. It opens with a woman, nude except for a trenchcoat, wandering a highway, desperately flagging down cars. She finally stops a man in a fancy car who snarls at her that she nearly made him crash. "Well get in!" he barks as he revs the engine. As she does, the ice-cool voice of the female DJ comes on the radio and coos "And now fellas, we'll hear that fine new platter by Nat. King. Cole." The opening credits run over the sound of the woman in the trenchcoat crying. The situation is eerie, cool, cruel. It's a dynamite opening scene. It has the jangling, fever dream quality of Lynch but with the polish and cool of Tarantino.

This film felt closest to Lost Highway for Lynch and Pulp Fiction for Tarantino. It's a tricky combination. The man in the car is our protagonist and is established in that first scene as something of a brute. This is reinforced as the film goes on. At one point he must torture a man to get information out of him. The camera closes up on our hero's face, teeth bared so wide he appears to be manically grinning. He ignores or exploits all women in the film, sometimes shutting them up but mostly blatantly ignoring them, giving them the cold shoulder as they vie for his attention. This is the Tarantino gene shining through.

On the flip side, the Lynch side, there's the rest of the world which ignores the protagonist and spins him about. Most of the film is the protagonist struggling to recover from some unexpected movement from the cops or the gangsters. The protagonist, for all of his standoffish silences, comes off looking like a stooge more often than not. There's a mysterious, calm, omnipotent quality to his enemies. At one point, an antagonistic cop threatens the protagonist. The cop starts his monologue with "Now listen, Mike. Listen carefully. I'm going to pronounce a few words. They're harmless words. Just a bunch of letters scrambled together. But their meaning is very important." He leaves a full two seconds of silence between each sentence.

I loved the film. It starts out jangling and evolves into squirming uncertainty and tension. The climax, when it comes, is hysterically terrible and amazing, almost descending into camp. It was an amazing noir. See it.

In the Shadow of the Moon

Saw In the Shadow of the Moon, a documentary about the moon landing. To get personal for a second, I have to admit I am completely taken by the awesomeness of the moon landing. I love it. I turn a jaundiced eye to most things but am a complete sucker for the poetry mined out of the moon landing. As such, I had a very personal, very emotional reaction to this film. The moon landing is put in the context of a tumultuous America. John and Ted Kennedy assassinated, Martin Luther King gunned down, racists and sexists showing their teeth in a protracted civil rights imbroglio while Vietnam made a slow grim mockery of our national pride and out of all of this riot and confusion, humanity stretched out its arm as a collective whole and put its fingerprint on the moon. Amazing.

The film seems to often juxtapose the profound and moving with the tedious and trivial. They describe, for example, how Aldrin peed in his suit's urine pouch while he checked the moon lander's stability. This did not ground the film for me, although that may be what they were going for, but felt like an uncomfortable shoulder-rubbing of beauty and ugliness. thematically, we move from the moon landing of Apollo 11 to the disaster of Apollo 13. This too was a triumph of engineering but there's somehow less pride to be had from merely rescuing men who were put into harms way. We briskly move from that to the following missions, where they collected rocks and drove their little buggy around. We are mercifully spared the vulgar nonsense of golfing on the moon.

Anyway, as with all stories, the question is where to end it and this one ends bittersweetly with the reminder that we don't go to the moon anymore. The surviving astronauts recount how their flights effected them. Some are newly appreciative of what we have here on Earth and shake their heads at people going to war over the price of gasoline (which only serves to further fouls our air.) Others have become more spiritual, explaining that after landing on the moon, they found God. One speaks powerfully of how they were hit with the realization that we, indeed even the spaceship, are all made of atoms born in stars.

The first landing on the moon felt like the natural climax and ending of the film and the continuation onto 13, 14, 15, etc felt sort of clumsy and muddled. The re-entry and ensuing media circus is saved for absolute last however, which goes to show that the filmmakers know their job after all. It was an alright film about a subject very dear to me.

A Hard Day's Night

Saw A Hard Day's Night (thanks, Chris!) It was odd. Basically, this is the like a movie where the members of One Direction or Justin Bieber or something pretend to film their real lives and sing songs and crack scripted jokes and fool around. Story-wise, this film is complete fluff because everyone involved knows that the demographic is teenagers who are literally only paying to see their pop-star idols appear on screen. So of course it didn't matter what they did and so they did what they wanted. The result is an interesting, meandering, shaggy-dog look at 60s London. We're not fetishizing the Mods and we're not pretending that psychedelia and hippies were around yet. We're just giggling and horsing around and even, for one beautiful little interlude, wandering around with Ringo, the humblest of all of the Beatles.

There's also a hilarious grandfather who looks like H P Lovecraft and speaks in an Irish sneer. The grandfather, being played by an actual actor, is hilarious. At one point he talks Ringo into "parading" by which he means sort of strutting about the streets. He bares his rat-like teeth and has the curiously blank but mobile face of a silent-film star. He's great.

The Beatles themselves do an alright job. Apparently this is the birth of their public personas and character types (which would live on in cartoons of various quality) and if you're a fan, apparently much in the film is quite a treat. They're not actors however and, entertaining and unpolished as they are, they're a bit too fake at times. That said, the film is best when it's not trying to sell The Beatles brand and is just fooling and futzing about. A pleasant, meander-y little film.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Saw Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a Tibetan film about the dull, prosaic, awesome, solemn death of an old man. His kidneys are failing him and, as he is dying, he is visited by ghosts and monsters and remembers his past lives. They are not altogether evil, these creatures, they are genuinely frightening but they are also mere facts of life, as simultaneously unexciting and grand as a sunset. The film Lynchianly focuses on the dullness of extraordinary events in order to illuminate the excitement of a fairly dull event: the final death of a dying man.

The film is pretty neat. It's very slow, alas, which made it difficult to sit through but there are moments of absolute mysterious magic that keep it lively. The film opens with the man, Uncle Boonmee, recalling his past life as a cow who escapes from his owners. He wanders into the woods, trailing a broken rope, only to be eventually collected again. As he-the-cow is lead away, the camera moves to the silent, black silhouette of a man standing in the forest, his eyes glowing red. We fade to black. What in the hell, right? The livening moments of magic are undercut however by the contemplative but almost tedious surrounding moments. Like it or not, even as the man lies dying there are bills to pay and the farm to mind. Even the "uncle" in the title underscores how remote we are from the action. He's not our brother, father, or son, but some barely-known uncle.

The film is deep and magical, fascinating and hypnotic. It is very unusual in parts, evoking fairy tales or horror films, and so I don't know if it would be better to risk boredom and see it alone or to risk cynicism and see it with a friend. A remote and difficult film, I think it got the better of me a bit, but it was so strange and I did like it.

Madeo

Saw Madeo, a Korean thriller about an aged mother who must find out who is the real killer of a young schoolgirl after her retarded son is accused of the crime. The son amiably agrees to whatever the cops say and when they suggest that maybe he killed the girl he smiles yes and signs whatever. It's not clear if he can read. This is a sad situation lightened a bit by some comic buffoonery and also by the (to me) totally alien culture. At one point the mother goes on a "Thank-You-Parents Bus Tour." What this is I have no idea, except that it apparently involves dancing to K-pop on a bus. Anyway, The central mystery of who killed the schoolgirl makes up the foreground of the plot but the background is made up of the much deeper mystery of the son's relationship with his mother.

One of the first scenes in the film is of the mother in her traditional medicine shop, watching her adult son fool around across the street as she chops some herbs. Suddenly the son is struck by a car and she simultaneously slices off her fingertip. The son is fine, just knocked down, but the scene serves to symbolically link the mother and son in a deep and significant way. He is her body. She suffers when he does. Their relationship is intense and weird. Incest is implied but, by the end of the film, I believe this is discredited. They are bound together by love and hate and old guilt. Their relationship is the real treasure of this film.

The film itself is paced like a mystery. The reveals of the murder case are teased to such heights they made me shiver and the reveals of the relationship case are no less impressive. The central character, the mother, is amazing. She opens the film in a field dancing to the music of the opening credits. I wondered if this was a sad film and her dancing was black irony or if this was a feel-good film and that her dancing was establishing her as a rakish, puckish character. It turns out it was kind of both. An interesting film.

Edit: according to the message boards over at imdb, the director often ties social commentary into his films. This explains the mother-son relationship being so fraught. The mother is supposed to love the son unconditionally, but at what cost? Must she even sacrifice her own humanity to do it? Apparently this is a much tougher film for Koreans.

The Last Picture Show

Saw The Last Picture Show, a melancholy film about a small southern mining town. The protagonist, Sonny, is a high-school football player of no great skill or distinction. Inexplicably estranged from his family (due to "not getting along" whatever that may mean) he mostly lives out of a combination pool-hall/diner/movie theater strip all owned by the kindly father-figure Sam. The film is about the soap opera lives of small-town folks who have little to do besides watch movies and play bedroom hopscotch. In this town there are few opportunities for happiness and plenty of time to identify and reflect on missed ones.

The film depicts a sad situation with intimacy and immediacy. Sonny has reached the end high-school and the end of his planned life. Now what? He can join the army or go down in the mine. Also he can get married, if he feels that would improve matters. A life of hardship and nothing stretches in front of him. His best friend Duane starts off dating JC, the town beauty-queen, who is even more severely trapped, being female. She spends the film running into the arms of whoever seems like the best ticket out of town. She breaks up with Duane outside of the school Christmas dance. "Merry Christmas, son." says an onlooking chaperon.

The film is also very erotically charged. Many sex scenes and lingering looks, many accommodating relationships. Who does what with whom is the only interesting thing going on in town and therefore of central importance to the film. It's got the fascination of small-town gossip and, under that, its ugliness too and, under that, the sadness and humanity of people with no future. But in that humanity there is warmth that must be protected and clung to, even as the cold wind perpetually howls outdoors.

Crossing the Line

Saw Crossing the Line, a documentary about the strange life of James Dresnok, an American soldier who defected to North Korea. The film is spooky and weird, using a soundtrack of computer bloops and fades to black which invoke an espionage film or an investigation of some kind. This is at odds with the rather warm and human psychological explanation the film seems to offer to explain his defection: that he was simply looking for a family. Born to immediately-divorced parents, he was foisted off on an elderly aunt and uncle who didn't know what to make of him and furthermore didn't want him. From there, he wound up in foster homes and orphanages, his unsettled life daily confronting him with the sad fact that he was unwanted. After a few run-ins with the law (juvenile delinquency, petty theft,) he joined the army and tried to make that his family. But the American Army is a difficult place to live in and eventually, in disgust, he defected to the mysterious land of the DPRK.

There he's used as a propaganda device, reading scripts about how well he lives for psychological warfare and playing the villainous american in their films. But they do take care of him. As with anything from North Korea, it's always unclear how deep the deception runs. Is James lying only to us, or to himself as well? Or does he actually believe what he says. Curiously, there were three other soldiers who defected at around the same time as James, though in unrelated incidents. James talks of one of the soldiers who felt his imprisonment more keenly than James did. James tells how this soldier claims to have been beaten by James, that he was forced to surgically remove a tattoo of a US Army logo from his bicep. James furiously declares that never was he, James, forced to do anything. That he too had removed tattoos but that was because his handlers earnestly explained the impropriety of having US insignia on his body. Does James not understand that this is coercion? Of the beatings, James declares the soldier a liar. "I'd like to kill him" James says, without any apparent irony.

The film is very interesting. As with any human life, James' does not fit into a neat narrative. This explanation of finding a family in the DPRK is tangential to the true thrust of the film which is to examine James' unusual life. He has a North Korean wife. He has children. At one point he movingly celebrates their ability to go to college, a privilege that, ignorant of school loans, he imagines would be denied in the US. All kinds of fascinating odds and ends litter this documentary. Very interesting.

Project X (2012)

Saw Project X (thanks, Emilio.) It was a tedious, depressing film. It follows three teenagers as they plan the most epic rager of a party ever that will turn their lives around and totally get them laid. The way its shot really makes it look like a horror film. It's shot found-footage style with shaky-cams and filmed by a teen who is "weird" (he wears a trench coat.) We see the main character's parents expressing worry about leaving their child alone. The film even opens with the bucolic noises of suburbia, lulling us into a calm which is traditionally soon to be shattered by some terrible event. Of course, the party is the thing which shatters this calm and which therefore is the monster of this horror.

The film was apparently shot on a sound stage where they built a house and invited a bunch of celeb-wanna-bees to party and film it with their cellphones. The resulting footage is pretty much what you would expect: poorly lit, not centered, and boring. They intercut this footage with clips telling the tedious tedious story of the protagonist finally boning a lady. The film is full of cruelty and the sort of mean foulness that seems funny when you're drunk and feeling belligerent. There's a little lap dog, for example, who is shut up in drawers, dyed orange, and tied to balloons. Presumably the film is making some anti-lap-dog statement. Perhaps the filmmakers are more cat people. Doubtful however. this party seemed pretty hostile to all forms of life.

I found the film tedious and deeply depressing. The film is very generous towards the party-goers. It's only near the end of the film, for example, that windows start breaking. The protagonist floats around, freaking out and then relaxing into this wicked-awesome party bro, as his parent's house is systematically destroyed. There's a car, for example, that the protagonist's father asks him to be careful of. This is the car whose submersion into the pool was featured so heavily in the trailers. The central trio keep shouting at each other in shrill teenage squawks that this party is absolutely crazy, but it just looked like a long, awful, dubstep-riddled chore to me. David Mamet argues in many of his works that man is only one bad day away from descending to level of animals. This film argues that we are only one party away, and it's right.

Melancholia

Saw Melancholia, a very pretty film by Lars Von Trier. It's a high-concept sci-fi movie about two sisters, Justine and Claire. The film is composed of two halves, the first focusing on Justine on her wedding night at a sumptuous castle-like hotel. She smiles and hangs on the neck of her fiance, but when she's hugging him, her face goes dead over his shoulder. She constantly sneaks away from the noise and the fun to be alone. At one point, in some kind of art-display-room, she angrily tears down the complex minimalist pictures and replaces them with paintings by Bruegel and Bosch and Caravaggio. She's clearly in some kind of deep and barely-hidden depression. Her antics finally spoil the wedding completely and it's called off, the guests leaving in confusion and disarray.

In part two, we focus more on Claire who must care for a Justine who is by this point so depressed that she can hardly get out of bed anymore. At this point we learn of a planet called Melancholia which is headed towards earth. I belive the metaphor to be obvious: that the planet is Justine's depression. There's debate among physicists whether this is truly the end of the world, or merely a close call.

The film forces us to stay in Justine's presence for a long time. At first there's some romance to this beautiful but depressed woman, but as time passes, we begin to feel the reality of hanging out with someone who clearly does not want to go on living. I imagine many critics reacted as they would to a real severely depressed person, with frustration and mounting impatience. The planet is actually in the sky however and as it looms Claire begins to fall apart as well.

So, not a cheery film, but it is simply gorgeously shot. The opening of the film is a montage of achingly slow, beautifully composed shots. Justine in her wedding dress, walking through a forest, tangled a fisherman's net. A horse rears and falls over. Justine walking with a young boy on her hip, her legs sinking up to the knee into the earth. Justine raising her hands as lighting crawls up her fingers like a Jacob's ladder. They depict tableaux of weariness and depression, but also of a strange beauty.

The film reminds me a lot of the work of Tarkovsky, famous for high-concept but grounded sci fi, whose work is similarly slow and hypnotic. Indeed, in what I consider to be a sort of hat-tip, this painting appears in Melancholia and is also heavily featured in Solaris. I don't think this film will exactly appeal to fans of high-concept sci-fi, but functions well as a drama. It's very slow, but then it's also very pretty, so there's that. Far more comfortable than most of Von Trier's oeuvre.

Dirty Carnival

Saw Dirty Carnival, a Korean gangster film. It was interesting. The protagonist is a low-level gangster looking for better things. He has a sickly mother, a wannabe-gangster brother and an adorable little sister who has 'collateral damage' written all over her. The film involves two betrayals that mirror each other and also involves a filmmaker who is a childhood friend of the protagonist. He keeps prying for information about mob life and hungrily records conversations. Eventually the filmmaker makes a film based on the protagonist's adventures, featuring the recreation of a high-profile murder. The clear implication is that that film is this film which implies in turn that the director has based this film on a real-life crime, an implication which is not backed up (by imdb at any rate.) This is a fiction by implication, underlined (rather heavy-handedly I thought) by a closing repetition of an early scene. The protagonist turns to the camera and says "hey [filmmaker dude], make it a real gangster film, huh?" Dumb little scene, but neat high-wire act.

High-wire self-reference aside, the rest of the film is well executed. The protagonist has an un-gangster-ish, pretty face and both repulses and attracts our sympathy with his actions. One moment he's strong-arming a family into paying their protection money and the next he's singing along to a goofy pop song on the drive home. He's an interesting, complex character, as are many others. The mob-boss is not an emotionless block as mob-bosses usually are, but has feelings and sensitivities as well. This is not full-blown sympathization, mind you, just nuance. Anyway an interesting film.

The Big Sleep

Saw The Big Sleep, the classic Philip Marlowe noir. It's got Bogey, it's got femmes fatale, it's got tommy guns and rich debutants with drug addictions. It's a marvelous old noir in the classic style. I must admit I didn't follow the knotty, knotty plot as well as I should but I feel the contortions of the plot are secondary to cool of Marlowe and to the general fireworks of wit on display. It's a great film. I don't really have much to say about it however. I just let it sort of wash over me. It contains few stylistic surprises and, since it defines the genre, doesn't contain much genre-breaking postmodern stuff either. A good sharp epitome of noir. A black diamond. These reviews are getting better and better!

Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

Saw Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, a documentary based on a book of letters written home from American soldiers in Vietnam to their friends and families. In keeping with the bare-bones approach of the book, this is just recordings of actors and actresses (some good ones too! Robin Williams and Robert Downey Jr, oh my!) reading the letters over a backdrop of footage of the soldiers. Every so often a news-program will interrupt to keep us up to date with where we are in the war. It's an incredibly emotional film. The soldiers start off talking of how terrible the elephant grass and mosquitos are and then, as the war drags on, move on to homesickness and a numb dread of death. One marine writes of a beautiful flower growing in the war zone, surrounded by prickly, thorny plants. He knows the flower will be burnt up along with the thorns by napalm but it will live forever, he writes, in his memory. The film ends with a devastating letter written by a mother to her dead son, left on the Vietnam war memorial. "I wonder if anyone ever stops to realize that next to your name, on this black wall, is your mother's heart." It just ruined me. A deeply moving film about a still contentious war.

The Bourne Identity

Saw The Bourne Identity (thanks Chris!) It was a spy thriller. I kept thinking it would be better as a show. The film has this generic, eternal feel to it. The film follows amnesiac spy (apparently named) Jason Bourne as he tries to recover his own slippery identity. Once it becomes clear that he's alive and not following his protocol, his handlers summon up "every" agent in the field to bring him down. It's not clear which three-letter agency is behind this, but there's men in business suits and american flag lapel pins who snarl about the "situation" and "messes." So we have an infinite supply of assassins on Jason's tail, a giant bag full of clues to unravel, piece by piece over the course of several seasons, inscrutably shadowy political machinations all set in the foreign-but-not-too-foreign rural Western Europe. Not a bad idea for a show.

Instead the film feels like a series of carefully loosened threads being abruptly tied up just before the end. The body of the film is full of long and luxurious car chases and montages of oh-so-subtle handoffs and men in suits hastily assembling guns and pretty women in high-tech switchboard rooms. It's all very timeless and pleasant but things seem to get resolved very suddenly. A five-minute shootout scene moves into a captured spy regurgitating a page worth of exposition. Shouldn't this spy choke out a name and address, leading Jason to the home of an old granny who is actually a retired spy-handler, who will give lead him to a Chinese bookie and then be shot herself? The point of the film is clearly in the action sequences, which is fine, but we have a lot of plot to get through and it feels uneven to me.

Then again, this is the first film is a series, so perhaps it's only natural that it feels a bit exposition-heavy. In any case spy films are not really my cup of tea and this one was not exceptional enough to overcome that boundary for me.

Hanna

Saw Hanna, the story of a pretty little girl raised in the wild by wolves and CIA hitmen, who speaks twenty different languages and who can kill a man at thirty paces just by snarling at them. The film's premise is ludicrous, but most of it is spent watching her slowly learn to feel. This becoming-human thing is represented by her appreciation for music, usually involving spanish guitars, calimbas, or other signifiers of earthy, soul-full music. On the antagonistic side of things, there's the wicked, red-headed and beautifully coiffed CIA handler who is trying to bring her in. Her music is German techno-pop and dubstep. The film uses these styles in a Satoshi Kon-like manner, letting the aggressive cheeriness of pop overwhelm and horrify us, letting plunky tunes and nasal-toned singers soothe us.

The film also has many allusions to fairy tales, particularly Hansel and Gretel. The girl Hanna is supposed to meet up with her father at the gingerbread Grimm house of some abandoned amusement park and I get the feeling that the CIA woman is supposed to be some kind of combined Wicked Witch/Stepmother figure. This theme is far in the background however and anyway I feel it's more a tacit acknowledgement that the premise is kind of played. The exact job title of the CIA woman is never clear, but it doesn't really matter: she's the evil Queen. The father's role is similarly opaque but what does that matter? He's the kindly woodcutter. What more do we need to know?

The film is fairly soothing and sweet. It's full of stylistic excesses which I quite like. There's an early sequence where Hanna escapes from a cement compound where the camera whirls around her as the screen is filled with strobing emergency lights. It's a fairly abstract, almost music-video-like sequence, telling its story with shorthand and cliches. Again, the fairy tale symbolism I believe is more of an apology than anything. The lack of grounding keeps the story feeling archetypal and ephemeral. I liked the stylish vapidity of it. It's not dumb or overly violent, just kind of sweet and airy. A surprising result considering its premise and ad campaign.

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance

Saw Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, an excellent film from Chan-wook Park's Revenge trilogy. The film opens on a pretty 19 year old girl who is sent to jail for smothering to death a 5 year old boy with a pillow. She is beautiful and is visited by a priest who is always shown smiling vacantly and idiotically. He tells her that behind her killer's face is an angel. She begins praying and becomes the madonna of the prison. When she is freed 13 years later (but only 5 minutes later in the film) the priest greets her with a block of white tofu. "It's traditional to eat tofu to celebrate a release from prison! Eat white and sin no more!" With one finger, she tips the plate over and says "Why don't you go fuck yourself."

Brilliant. Delightful. I'm sold. She's now an unknown element, capable of faking a religious conversion for 13 years and cruel enough to swear at a long-time ally. The film promises delights and confusions. The style of the film re-enforces this, the story narrated by a creaky old woman's voice, the narrative zigzagging back and forth over old and new material. When she gets out of prison, for example, she swears vengeance but on who and why we do not know. For all fo the rushing breathless style of the film there's a lot, in fact, we are not told. She has her friends create an incredibly ornate gun which she had designed in prison, but which she then almost never uses (not even on her nemesis.) Confusing.

I believe she is supposed to symbolize vengeance. She is called angelic more than once and claims to have an angel inside of her. This is the angel of vengeance, presumably. She switches eyeshadow to "blood red" and keeps red candles burning in her appartment. Near the end of the film, during a lull in conversation, the characters bring up that the French say that a lull means an angel is passing through the room. The camera pans heavenwards, fixing on a chandelier stocked with faux red candles. There is never any comparison with what the protagonist is doing with the justice of law and order or even with God's justice. The protagonist (and indeed the movie) treats the idiot priest with total contempt. The film never examines the virtue of her motives at all.

It is my understanding however that revenge is a kind of useless thing. It feels good in the moment but doesn't fix anything. Like other revenge films, I think this film is not enriching, but it extremely satisfying. The film's opening credit sequence happens over gorgeous classical music and animated flowers twining over white hands which are kneading flour and sugar and drizzling bright red syrup and frosting delicate confections. These confections, and the decadence surrounding them, are similarly delicious but unenriching. This film knows what it is. Delicious and sinful and probably bad for you. I loved it.

Senso

Saw Senso, a fairly dismal melodrama about the doomed love affair between an Italian Contessa and an Austrian soldier named Mahler (although he is not supposed to be the composer of the same name) set during tha Austrian occupatin of Italy in 1866. The film is pretty clear about the doomed nature of their affair. When they first meet, he tells her that he only derives self-worth from his face and from the affection of women. Later on, the Contessa has second thoughts which Mahler quiets by callously talking about how he's risking treason and the firing squad to see her and so on. This could be sincerely meant but the camera closes in on his face, furtively glancing at the Contessa to see what effect his words have had.

The film sets their romance against the backdrop of war and occupation, the chaos of the outside world driving the Contessa deeper into the arms of her Don Juan and also highlighting the unnatural calm of their situation. I wonder if there was a parallel between his country's occupation of hers and his occupation of her heart. I kept hoping for one, but for the most part the film is about the cruel exploitation of this sheltered woman. This culminates in a grand finale where the Contessa must walk the streets of a recently freed city as joyous soldiers anonymously paw at her body. I found this film kind of tiring.

The film is shot in a sumptuous, opulent style, full of lush color and beautiful houses. The actors are always immaculately dressed in gorgeous clothes and, even when the soldier is meant to be roughing it in the woods, his white cape is spotless. I assumed that this would be a cream-puff of a film, having to do only with the hysterical emotions of rich twits and... for the most part it is, but I wish the film weren't so cruel. It's not as bad as, say, The Passion of Joan of Arc (to say nothing of the true masterpieces of pain, like Dancer in the Dark,) but it's surprisingly unpleasant when it wants to be.

No End In Sight

Saw No End In Sight, an angering documentary about the Iraq war. So, as you all know I'm very ignorant of history, geography, and foreign cultures so I feel really unable to comment on the film's accuracy, especially in regards to such recent events. So, I approached this film with some excitement, hoping for dry, emotionless education. Alas, this film has a clear and shamelessly exposed agenda. This is not to say the facts it presents aren't true, just that I have no faith that they're being presented in an accurate way. I can't tell.

The film focuses on the utter lack of management immediately after Saddam was deposed. We hear that Rumsfeld and Cheney and a few other select people were to blame for this lack of clear direction and that with their silence they allowed unsavoury characters to take over in the ensuing chaos. The words 'cabal' or 'agenda' are not actually used, but it's clear what the film is implying.

The film is almost always very clear about how it wants you to feel about any given piece of information. Colin Powell's aide, for example, is interviewed in a shadowy conference room, where he growls out that they had no idea of the situation in Iraq. Later on, once Powell has become a good-guy in this story by opposing Cheney and Rumsfeld, the room is much brighter, the focus tighter. The opinion of a speaker is always telegraphed by how much light there is in the room. Violins weep, trumpets sneer, and the bass rumbles ominously. The point of this film is clearly not to inform but to provoke.

It is incidentally informative however and I do feel more educated than I was pre-film-watching, but the heavy-handed white text on black backgrounds and voice-overs and montages of violence get wearying. I believe the point of this movie was mainly to get people annoyed at Bush and in this aim it succeeds. There are good guys and bad guys and precious little in between and I do not trust such a simple narrative. Don't get me wrong: I don't think that the filmmakers are maliciously hiding or omitting information, but merely that they are very excited about getting their message across and completely sacrifice nuance in the process. This film is exciting and interesting, but it is also propaganda.

The Slums of Beverly Hills

Saw The Slums of Beverly Hills (thanks, Nina!) It was a cute coming of age film about a girl who is described as underaged despite looking 20-something. She has recently undergone a growth spurt and must navigate the tricky change from girl to woman with no mother, sister, or even permanent residence. Her family consists of a broke 65-year-old father and two brothers who have made her into their emotional punching bag. The brothers are introduced as complete antagonists but soften into mere doofuses by the end of the film.

Anyway, into this mix is dropped the drug-addicted, dildo-possessing cousin of the protagonist. The cousin plays a dual role of experienced worldly teacher and complete fuck-up who must be babysat. The film essentially is just watching this quintet of father, two brothers, cousin and protagonist go on adventures as they pathetically struggle to attain the lifestyle they all believe they deserve. The father insists they're staying in Beverly Hills for the good school but we never see any of them go to any school even once.

The film starts off by portraying this as delusion and denial and indeed there is some very troubling stuff which comes to light by the end of the film, but we conclude finally with the protagonist realizing that this is just a game of make-believe. Everyone knows what's really going on, they just... pretend. And that's how they cope and the film defies us to find fault with their coping mechanisms. Also there's a lot of tits. I think there were like five boob-shots, so there's that.

I enjoyed this film. It was queasily awkward at times but was overall loveable and winning.

Amigo

Saw Amigo, a small film about the occupation of a village in the Philippines by American forces during the Spanish American war. The film was made in 2010 and is refreshingly told from the village-eye view. The Americans are not especially characters until they become integrated into village life. It is not the noble American sergeant who is the hero, but the head of the village who struggles to keep as many of his people alive as possible.

He struggles between the indifferent Americans, the freedom-fighting rebels, and the various scheming rivals within his own village who would steal his leadership. These last are the most frustrating and least sympathetic. The Americans, as I say, are largely regarded as forces of nature. They sweep in with chinese labourers and with complete indifference, if not outright hostility, for local custom. The rebels are seen as idealistic. On the right side fundamentally, but living far too dangerously, in caves and off of handouts from local villages. The entire village could not become rebels. There's also a cruel priest who is freed by the Americans from the village jail (I believe he was imprisoned for political reasons, but the details are obscure for me. I am very weak in history.) He instantly turns on the village head, the ownership of a patch of land being his motive. He is a great source of frustratingly self-righteous and duplicitous speeches about heathens and knowing one's place. He counsels one woman to put her rebel son out of her heart. "He has turned his back on God!"

Basically the film is about one man's struggle to keep his village alive and being ground up in the gears of machines beyond his or anyone's comprehension. The film is shot in a cheap, flat manner. I suspect this was a TV-movie or something. Most of the actors are unknowns and deliver their lines broad and flat. And yet the film has tension and pathos. It doesn't reach the hysteria of some of the American melodramas of the 50s but is quite effective in its own way. It also has something interesting to say about imperialism and occupation but these concepts are anachronistic for the time-period and thus are not harped upon (and good, I say! Nothing sets my teeth on edge like a character being the judgemental voice of contemporary culture, tutting primly at the sins of the past. So unrealistic.) This non-harping-on of the message though makes it a little hard to decypher. It clearly condemns the Americans but so to does it condemn the rebels. Everyone is tainted. An interesting film, I feel it could spark a good discussion in a sociology class.

A Bittersweet Life

Saw A Bittersweet Life, a Korean gangster film. It follows an emotionless attack-dog bodyguard of some kind of gangster. He's sent to tail the gangster's girlfriend to see if she's cheating. The girlfriend is sweet and adorable and (as you might be able to predict) awakens the protagonist's long-dormant emotions. If she is not cheating on the gangster, we know, she soon will be. So, the film toddles along. There's some interesting stuff at the beginning involving wind and trees and causality and perception, but this is window-dressing to the real business at hand which is to watch guys in suits fire handguns.

To the film's credit, the gunfights and kick-boxing scenes are spaced out nicely and very sumptuously presented to the viewer. One fight, for instance, takes place in a fur coat warehouse, which allows the hero to lay out a spread of guns on gorgeous white fur. There's the predictable Korean super-melodrama of course, but I felt it meshed nicely with the story of a bodyguard feeling feelings for possibly the first time. This is a nice little film. It didn't hit me in any emotional or intellectual way, but it's a crime flick, so what do you expect?

Floating Clouds

Saw Floating Clouds, a black-n-white Japanese film from the 50s about a woman who returns to Japan from French Indochina, following WW2. She cannot find a job and defaults to drifting (in an almost cloud-like manner) between different men. There are two mainstays that she keeps returning to, one Don Juan-ishly infuriating and romantic but chronically unable to keep a job, the other stable but cruel. To complicate matters, the stable man is already married and the Don Juan has a wandering eye. Other women, even delivery-girls, always arouse the protagonist's jealousy and understandably so. The protagonist is almost constantly in a state of flux. Even when her life is relatively stable, we get close-ups of her face looking pained, her eyes glancing sideways, ever suspicious of the sand her life is built on.

The film gives us a bit of cheat-sheet for the state of things with the brightness of the picture. The most idyllic days, when she is in French Indochina, are bright and sunny. When she first meets the cruel man, he insults her causing her to run into a hallway full of plants and venetian blinds, striating her body with shadows. That evening, in the dark of night, she is raped. Later on in the film she is planning a likely-sounding future with her current boyfriend and all seems well until a shadow moves across their faces as they're talking and we know trouble's brewing. There are also rays of hopeful sunlight and cheerful maids in white kimonos.

It's an interesting film but it ultimately is not very optimistic about this refugee woman's chances. She talks of herself as drifting and being rootless. Her fellow-travellers/sufferers are similarly displaced, changing jobs, moving, dying. I was not really in the mood for this sort of film and anyway I prefer the attitude that life is change (so get used to it!) To compound this, my subtitles (oh hated enemy!) were borked in some strange way: all of the 'b's were replaced by 'd's. This lead to some unintentional comedy as everyone bemoans being unable to find a 'jod' or one man telling the protagonist that he's left his 'jod' at the 'dank.' One character mournfully cries about his wife dying of 'tuderculosis' and another cheerfully announces that she has 'drought your dar dill.' Silliness.

Objectified

Saw Objectified, a documentary about design. It opens with a winning bit of design trivia: that some toothpicks with serrated ends are intended to have those ends broken off and used as toothpick stands. This is a neat little tidbit that suggests a whole secret world of life-hacks and shortcuts that is, of course, bad design. Design, we are told, should be as unobtrusive as possible, as clear as possible. It should produce products that are completely disposable but also much stand the test of time. It must be all things to all men just like (for instance) Apple products are. Let's talk about the iPhone.

Based on the title, I sort of assumed this would be an anti-consumerist message film. I was sort of relieved to find that it is instead a sort of evocative and scattershot series of interviews with famous product designers. They briefly briefly hit upon software user interface design, but just as quickly as it is brought up, it's shied away from and we're watching an old man revving the engine of his vintage, spotless teal truck. They also briefly touch on 3D printers, the emergence of maker culture, and more broadly the way that electronics have revolutionized our lives and our products. It's all very thrilling.

There's not many surprises here however and I frankly enjoyed listening to the absurd and delightful designers talk about their lives and their philosophies. We talk surprisingly little about how things are designed and more about the virtues of the final designs. Japan is fetishized, Apple is praised, environmentalism is brought up like it can be helped by mass-producing more objects. I personally prefer a utilitarian and durable quality to my products (I'm typing this on a desktop my parents got me when I graduated from high school.) During a montage of derelict vacuum-tube monitors and coffee makers sitting on the curb in the rain, I wondered how many of those were broken and how many were just old. I would rather have a plain ceramic mug than one 3D printed out of fibers.

But here I am talking about design, so perhaps this documentary interested me more than I'm willing to admit. It's an interesting conversation-starter and an interesting look into an industry I know little about, just don't expect to see the manufacture of anything, not even designs.

Dumb and Dumber

Saw Dumb and Dumber (thanks, Chris!) It was the extremely-well-known-if-not-classic tale of two penniless alcoholics who track down a rich woman to bumblingly return her suitcase to her. Along the way, they unwittingly foil a kidnapping scheme, kill a hitman, and beat up a mean ol' bully. The film is half road-trip and half snobs vs slobs comedy. During the roadtrip part, they are trying to get to Aspen without knowing where Aspen is. This bit gets us acquainted with their personalities and also reassures us of their inability to fail into success. When they arrive in Aspen and stumble into wealth, they get to fight over the romantic interests of the suitcase-owning woman by showing up at hotels so ritzy, presidents and kings stay there. To the film's credit, they do not trash those places.

The protagonists are the sort of cartoon idiots who mean no harm. They are miraculously able to function in society despite having apparently no impulse control. They aren't so dumb that they don't know what rain and snow is, for example, or what death is, but when they're down to their last dollar they just can't help buying a giant foam novelty cowboy hat. They're endearing. They do of course kill a hitman, but they only do it with the poison he was going to slip them. If he hadn't meant them any harm, their encounter might have been harmless. Anyway, the film lets them get off more-or-less scot-free ethically speaking.

I didn't find the film hilarious, but neither did I find it tedious or offensive (which is my reaction to a lot of comedies.) It's a charming little film. I get the feeling that I would hate to be in the company of these jokers, but they're entertaining to watch. There's something guileless and sweet about a pair of guys who cry at kodak camera commercials.

Beginners

Saw Beginners, a sophisticated relationship movie of the melancholy, whimsical, Woody Allen variety. The film follows Oliver, a boy raised by parents in a lovely but loveless relationship. After his mother dies Oliver's father comes out as gay and begins to really live and enjoy his life just before dying himself. The film is emphatically not about his father's crazy gay sex life however, but about Oliver who has no idea how relationships with love included actually work. Despite being an artist, Oliver is restrained and bottled up, fearing subtly that he's inherited something from his father that has left him unable to love. Perhaps he's gay, perhaps he was just emotionally neglected, whatever.

He inherits an adorably scruffy Jack Russell terrier who talks to him via subtitles and who symbolizes his father's love. Pathetic and needy, the dog whines when left alone but is also full of surprises. At a party someone asks if the dog does tricks. Oliver gruffly says no, but the dog reacts to sit, speak, shake. Clearly, there are unplumbed depths here. Anyway, at this party Oliver meets a French actress who has similar troubles connecting to people. Being an actress, she is keenly aware that who people are is not the same as what they appear to be. She talks about how much she used to love hopping from fancy hotel room to fancy hotel room but that now they just seem like a long succession of empty rooms, waiting for her. Her father, by the way, only calls her up to talk about killing himself. Nice.

So, the film is really interested in finding out what's making Oliver so sad and finding out if he can ever prove himself wrong and have a serious, strong relationship. The film is cute and melancholy, sophisticated and complex. Everyone's fairly wealthy and if I were in a grumpier mood I would lambaste it for dwelling on the relationship troubles of the rich and comfy. I liked this film. I'm not the most emotionally intelligent person, but I was able to understand its beats and its points. A small, pleasant film, and well done.

The Good, The Bad, The Weird

Saw The Good, The Bad, The Weird, a Korean take on the Good/Bad/Ugly western film. Like that film, it too is set in the middle of a civil war, this one the war for Korean independence. We follow three dudes (the titular good, bad, and weird guy) who are hunting for a treasure map. The good dude is an American-style cowboy, complete with stetson and six-shooter. The bad guy is a gangster, with starched suit and hair fetchingly combed over one eye. The "weird" guy most closely resembles a mongolian bandit (though I'm probably misinterpreting things.) This anarchic, collage-ish mixture of genres and styles mirrors the entire film, which merrily bounces along from town-wide shootout to tense standoff to jolly train robbery. Even the nature of the central treasure map is confusing. Does it show the way to Japanese war treasure or to Qin-dynasty riches? Or is it actually a map of military positions? Does it really matter?

the film is a lot of fun, always upping the ante and trying to top itself. Somewhere near the climax of the film, the three protagonists are chasing each other, each with their associated gang of mongolians, gangsters, and sheriffs trailing behind, and behind them, the entirety of the Japanese army, and behind them artillery. Amazing bullshit. This is not a film to take tremendously seriously, but it's a lot of freewheeling, mashed-up fun.

The Life of Oharu

Saw The Life of Oharu, a fairly depressing Japanese film from the 50s. It follows Oharu, now a 50-year-old prostitute, as she recalls her entire life up to that point. She began life as the daughter of a samurai in the court and falls precipitously from there to nobleman's courtesan to shopkeeper's wife to servant to prostitute. Her life is punctuated by an almost absurd degree of bad luck and misfortune. Every time she narrowly escapes a bad situation, people from her past come bubbling up, ruining her all over again. The is a sad film and, like most sad films, wants to change your mind about something. In this film that something is class divisions.

There is a theme of bridges, walls, and gates. The first lines in the film are spoken by giggling whore, rebuking a john for coming to this side of the city gates. We first see Oharu warming herself by a fire under a bridge. In her past, when she is first expelled from the palace, she is walking across a bridge. The camera shifts and peers at her from under the bridge, optically placing the bridge above her. This is a foreshadowing of things to come and an illustration of the film's interests. There are those who walk above the bridge, and there is the muck beneath it, but these distinctions are completely arbitrary. We do not know what placed the beggar on the street corner and thus shouldn't judge. Of course we do though because it flatters us and allows us to feel deserving of our own comfort. Similarly to the bridge symbol, many walls in the film stand broken, and all gates are open.

In Oharu's case her sexual history in particular is used to discredit her. Pre-emptive jealousy of women and the lust of men are her frequent undoing. At one point, a rich farmer takes an interest in her because she alone is not grovelling for his money. He asks her to marry him and, after reasoning that this might be the best she can do, he gloatingly crows that even she has her price. This is the film at its most frank. We are all corruptible. We are all looking for comfort and respect. We are all trying to stay alive. This levelling of the human race echoes the teachings of many religions and indeed the film ends with a soulful song about Buddha, but the film doesn't let organized religion off either. At one point near the end, Oharu is exhibited to a bunch of young monks to show them the folly of earthly desires, to scare them into a life of celibacy. By this point her dignity is so eroded that she is at least relieved that she didn't have to sleep with anyone. A sad, ponderous film about man's inhumanity to man.

American Movie

Saw American Movie, a documentary about the eternal, three-year quest to make a 34-minute film and the eternal, nine-years-and-counting quest to make a full-length film called Northwestern. The man behind this is Mark, a man in his late 20s who delivers newspapers and begs money from everyone he knows. He bemoans his father's stinginess but reveals later that he is 36k in debt to him already. He presses on, Ed Wood-esque, in the face of incompetence and roadblocks. At one point his long-time friend Mike (who is clearly reeling from some kind of harrowing, youthful drug adventures (some of which he talks about)) calls a halt to the filming because his soda is going to freeze if it's sitting there on the snow like that.

The film is an odd mix of sad, funny, and inspiring. I am interested in the idea of pursuing bad dreams and was smugly folding my arms through most of this, content to consign his film to a pipe dream, but then his actual film is shown and it's clearly amateur but it's not terrible by any means. It looks almost downright intriguing (heck, I added it to my to-see list.) When he talks about his films it's evocative and stirring but then he starts raving about how sitting around, getting drunk and dreaming is what the American dream is all about. At one point, drunk, he hurls a stream of invective at the factory-workers of the world. Of course though, a factory job would really not be that bad for him, it would just require giving up his dream.

The film fed into my interests and I think his dream is not bad per se, it's just that Mark isn't rich enough to actually pull it off and wasn't born in a time when digital film and editing software was cheap and ubiquitous. We are left with a huge dose of delusion keeping what is ultimately a small dream afloat. It's fairly depressing but then the mood is kept light by the gloriously absent Mike and Mark's hilariously dour and dodderingly ancient relatives (whom he lectures for not having ambitious dreams, naturally.) The whole thing is kind of a freak show which turns out to be the best hour-long trailer for a 30-minute short ever.

Ida

Saw Ida (thanks, Timp!) It was a black and white Polish film. Rather austere, the film follows the titular character Ida who is a novice nun. Before she takes her vows, she must visit her only relative, a female judge of some kind, named Wanda. Ida expresses a desire to see her family's grave and Wanda reveals that she and Ida's family are jewish, so that's going to be tricky. This kicks off a quest for the two women to find their past and put that past to bed.

Whereas Ida is always sitting silently, observing the world through giant, mouse-like eyes, Wanda is aggressive and troubled, proudly talking about her days as a prosecution lawyer, and about how many people she sent to death. "Red Wanda, that's me." Lacking faith in a just god, she seeks vengeance and closure. She is doing this for justified but selfish reasons. Ida meanwhile is removed from the situation and wants to help the clearly troubled Wanda but does not know how to. She also has her own troubles involving her upcoming vow. Exposed to the secular world for the first time ever, she finds it full of moral ambiguities and cute saxophone players.

The film is subtly shot and subtly acted. The characters both hold their emotions close to their chests and often us poor audience-members can only tell what they're feeling by what they're not doing. Example: when Ida and Wanda finally find the grave, Wanda moves stiffly and does not make any display of emotion. I feel like I haven't quite got the feel of the the film yet. There's probably much more to be said about the Polish holocaust and about victimhood being used as a weapon, but I'm much more interested in the oblique, obscure characters. This is not an easy film but it's interesting and sincere.

Being Elmo, A Puppeteer's Journey

Saw Being Elmo, A Puppeteer's Journey, a documentary about the life of Kevin Clash, the voice and puppeteer of Elmo. The film is short and very sweet, intended to rekindle happy memories of childhood TV programs and promise more magic to come. The story of Kevin's life is a whirlwind rags-to-riches adventure where he dreams as a child of being a puppeteer and, through fanatical devotion and rapid ladder-climbing, he achieves his dream. There's a lot of interesting information about Kevin. We are told that he created muppets in high school and was (of course) bullied for it. We then instantly turn to talking about his performances for mentally disabled children. And the whole documentary is kind of like that. We come within a hair's-breadth to turmoil and conflict and then trip merrily off to heart-warming pleasantness.

This isn't a weakness exactly. I mean, the film is clearly meant to just be heartwarming and nice and there's nothing wrong with being heartwarming and nice, it's just that there's a large and obviously unhappy hole missing in the story of Kevin's life. The unending sweetness seems unreal and illusory. I don't feel lied to exactly, just that I was not told the whole story. Kevin starts off the film talking about the magic houses and kingdoms of Captain Kangaroo and Walt Disney, and how he wished he could crawl inside of the television into that more wonderful and happy realm. To go by this documentary, he appears to have actually succeeded. He has achieved his dreams and does meaningful work which he loves. The story of this journey is heart-warming and sincere and forces smiled on your face but as far as I can tell real life isn't like that. This film is sweet and substantive, but not analytical. I think it's very good and appropriate for mass audiences that this isn't biting or incisive, but it leaves me personally feeling suspicious.

The Chaser

Saw The Chaser, a Korean crime film. This one follows an ex-cop turned pimp who has lost one of his girls after she went to a john's house. Then the same john calls for another girl some time later (months or years or something) and his ex-cop-ly skills are re-aroused to investigate. Sure enough, the john is a psycho killer whom fate smiles upon and gets every lucky break while the increasingly harried-looking pimp always remains just a few tantalizing steps behind him. The film is a cop-drama with an ex-cop, not that that changes much. It just means that the cliched turning-in-the-badge scene has already happened. Anyway, I thought the film was pretty good.

It has the rhythms and beats of a comedy, with tiny infuriating details and coincidences always frustrating the hero, and goofy idiot-side-kick characters and also an adorably sullen little girl to silently judge the pimp when he screws up. There's also a B-plot going on about the mayor of the city having poop flung at him by a protester. This thread serves to muddy the main plot when the cops become involved, but I was hopeful that there could be some message hear about classism, that the mayor being dirtied was a more sensational story than a mere prostitute being killed. I think some theme along these lines could be mined out, but it's certainly not the main point of the film. The film is much more straightforward, so far as I can tell, and is more interested in the simple thrill of the chase.

I think this film wouldn't bear up to repeat viewings. The tension of the chase is undercut somewhat if you already know who gets away. Also, the killer tantalizingly slipping through the righteously indignant fingers of the pimp is frustrating enough the first time. The film is messy and fun however, full of false starts and blind alleys. Also I loved the twisty back-alleys that the film is predominantly set in. Also, I have to commend this film for being relatively light on the melodrama. I've whined about the Korean predilection for melodrama before and was worried that this one would be full of pointless histrionics but, baring one or two scenes, this one was almost understated. Anyway, not a bad film at all. Also the scene where the prostitute is realizing what deep trouble she's in is great.

In the Realm of the Senses

Saw In the Realm of the Senses, a frankly erotic film made in Japan and distributed by a French production house (so you know it's gonna be pretty crazy. They couldn't even find a Japanese distributor for this nuttiness.) It's a fictionalized version of the exploits of Sada Abe. The film is fairly lurid, more shocking than revealing. It's fairly edgy for a drama but fairly tame for a porno. All of the naughty bits are on display and there's a ton of sex happening but the focus of the film is on the spiraling, mutually-destructive love affair between the concubine Sada and married gigolo Kichi.

The film has many interesting artistic flourishes. For example, their relationship starts in the depths of winter. Spring or summer would make more sense, but instead their fiery passion lies in contrast to the weather. Later, as the relationship becomes debauched and veers into dangerous excesses, it becomes spring. This inversion of the normal symbolism of romance feels off-kilter and bizarre. Based on a true story as it is though there's some parts that don't make thematic sense, such as her intellectual customer on the side who pops up now and again.

But yes, there's a lot of sex. You see fellatio, penises and vaginas. It's very frank and usually fairly sexy. The film is not as progressive as you might think based on this however. It only gets away with all of this flopping genitalia by ultimately being kind of schoolmarmish-ly dour about their relationship. It starts off passionate but the passion never fades. This sounds great, but their romance veers into bizarre, controlling areas. Knives make repeated appearances, with associated symbolism involving penetration, blood and slits. The final, violent ending serves as a prim reminder for us to stick with missionary position for the sake of procreation. It's a kind of inverse Romeo and Juliette, focusing less on romance than on sex and ending not with a beautiful tragedy but with an ugly tragedy. I wish the film had been a bit kinder in its ending but that of course would not mirror reality and would have been cheating.

We Live in Public

Saw We Live in Public, a documentary about the life of Josh Harris, an early 90s internet mogul. He opens with him greeting us with a "Hello, Mom." He addresses us, or perhaps his camera, as his caregiver. This is a clip from a video he sent to his dying mother in lieu of visiting her. He immediately follows this with a declaration of "virtual love." It's an odd moment. Josh Harris, we discover, had the foresight to predict youtube and streaming video as being a media game-changer back in the 90s back before broadband even existed. He also predicted the rise of home-brew, flash-in-the-pan internet celebrities. He then missteps in his remarkably accurate prediction and extends this to everyone. Ala Andy Warhol, he predicts everyone will be living public lives all of the time. But in a way, of course, he's right.

So, the film follows Josh as he becomes suddenly and fantastically wealthy (net worth $80M) founds some far-fetched media websites and descends into excess and art-film experiments on how constant attention effects society. Throughout it all, he and other new-media personalities pontificate about how everyone wants to be seen and how this will change everything. They've got a point that here in the future we are sharing things a lot more than we used to be, but he doesn't realize that much of what we put out is carefully filtered and posed to show off our best sides. Control of our public image and the ability to conceal what we want has only become more important. The reality-tv pioneers of the past thought we would become more comfortable with being more open and accessible but if anything it's resulting in personas and masks and poses becoming more important. To be art-school cute for a moment, We Pretend In Public.

One of Josh's experiments involved setting up a bunker of food and and drugs and guns and cameras and inviting a bunch of attention starved (and very enthusiastic) performance artists to live there for a few months. At first they're loving the non-stop attention but after a while they get very tired of constantly performing. The project is shut down after a police raid (which is hilarious) and Josh then reverse the camera, becoming the star of his own 24-hour surveillance show and, of course, broadcasting everything onto the internet. He slowly discovers what every actor already knows: that a performer is really far more at the mercy of their audience than the reverse. His desire to be watched is really a desire for acceptance but all he gets is scrutiny. How like his absent and "virtually loved" mother we are perhaps. All Josh seems to want is a hug but discovers that a stage is a lonely place to be, even one as seemingly intimate as an internet chatroom.

National Treasure

Saw National Treasure (thanks, Chris!) It was an unusual film, coming out in 2004 in the midst of a rapid polarization of American politics and riding on the coattails of the hit summer novel The Da Vinci Code. The Christian right was denouncing the idea that Jesus had a wife while the left was bitterly recounting votes. Conspiracy and paranoia were thick in those times and lo, here comes human internet meme Nicolas Cage to weave a treasure-hunt mythos around the founding of America. A very well-timed film. I imagine it did very well for exactly one box-office weekend [fact-check: actually, it was #1 for almost three weeks.]

Curious timing aside, it's a fairly breathless film. It's not very substantial but then no one expected it to be. The heroes are kind of cliche stock characters: the love interest, the sarcastic comic foil, the wiley protagonist. The love interest is also super-smart and competent for a change, but then again they keep talking about how she never shuts up (although she talks considerably less than the motor-mouthed Cage,) so I don't think this counts as progressive exactly. Oh well. The point of the movie, and indeed its greatest strength, lies in the chase from clue to clue, each one relying on knowledge of ever-more obscure trivia relating to 1700s America.

The film is very fun in an action-film sort of way. I was immensely gratified that it didn't pull any "The real treasure was freedom!"-style shenanigans. This is a very straightforward film, it's fundamentally fluffy lightness is only briefly hidden by the timing of its release. It's relatively long but doesn't feel that way. It jumps from climax to climax, always entertaining, never challenging. A pleasant little film.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Saw We Need to Talk About Kevin, a film about the mother of a school shooter (named Kevin.) The film opens with the mother in her younger years attending the tomatina festival, the largest tomato-throwing fight in the world. She is held aloft over the crowd, arms outstretched like Christ on the cross, as buckets of tomato viscera are poured over her. She will be crucified over the actions of her son for the peace of mind of the parents of the other dead children. She welcomes this abuse, angrily (or perhaps warily) rebuffing all help and sympathy.

The film is pretty intense. It's shot exactly like a horror film (read the imdb plot summary. It sounds like The Omen.) This stylistic choice forces us to instinctively tense and flinch, but no screams or scares come. This film is really more about guilt and about uncertain dread. The essential message of the film is that the parents of these monsters are sometimes equally victims of their children. It's very gripping.

The film is not without its flaws however. It requires the mother to be very cold sometimes and to be a complete patsy to her son's barbs. I mean, your son is a sociopath lady. He's not the right person to cattily whisper-criticize fat people with. At one point she's reading him the story of Robin Hood in old english, full of thous and thees. He loves it in spite of being a bit tricky to follow even for adults. Unrealistic. Also Kevin himself is very boilerplate crazy-kid. His bad relationship with his mother is drawn realistically in his infancy but as he grows older, he becomes this 4chan-dweller who collects computer viruses and doesn't wield a katana, but might as well. Also he's this darkly attractive, beautiful dude who in real life would be drowning in attention (if not sex.) There's also some laziness short-hands here and there (wine and pills, huh? So I guess you're in some kind of mental difficulty?)

All that aside however, it's a very interesting, mesmerizing film. The horror-film pacing keeps us watching and this mounting sense that something is going wrong and should be corrected. I kept thinking that if she just talked to everyone involved it would be better, but perhaps that's the point of the film.

Brotherhood of War

Saw Brotherhood of War, a Korean war film. It's called the Korean Saving Private Ryan and indeed is extremely reminiscent of the Steven Spielberg war film. Both films start in the present day, with an old soldier recalling his entire life up to that point. Both films are full of pathos and drama, feature horns and violins on the soundtrack, and both are clearly just oozing with money. There are elaborate crowd scenes with hundreds of refugees, stretching off into the distance and of course endless battle scenes with a football field's-worth of sod being flung into the sky.

The plot is much goofier than Saving Private Ryan however. It is this: two brothers in pre-war Korea spend their lives eating candy out of each other's hands and lolling their heads in a perpetual near-swoon of absolute ecstasy. Their adorable lives are brought to a screeching halt by the Korean war being declared. They are both drafted and the older brother sets about trying to keep his younger brother safe and/or sent back to civilian life. He does this by volunteering himself for every risky mission there is, so that his brother is spared as per a bargain struck with his commander. This results in the brothers' personalities diverging. The elder becomes battle-hardened, blood thirsty, and decorated and the younger brother stays more normal and undistinguished. The brothers clash, switch sides and battle against the evil communists and even against the cruelties of the South Korean army. Eventually the war ends.

I didn't think very much of this film. War films are not really interesting to me. I sort of enjoy them as history lessons (I'm very ignorant when it comes to history) and find all of the grandstanding and posturing to be faintly ridiculous. At one point the brothers embody the pro/anti war sentiments, shouting back and forth "We've got to kill them! They're savage animals" "But we are not animals!" "They started this war!" etc. I side more with the naive younger brother but of course I have the enormous luxury of not having my opinions matter that much anyway. The film is not so much about justifying war or teaching history as it is with glorifying warfare. Somber violins and horns respectfully play over coffins of anonymous dead. By dint of running and shouting, the two brothers play mayhem with the army's structure and, (most damning of all) the trenches almost look like a kind of fun place to be. There's a lot of hustle and bustle and limbs being blown off, but our two brothers are safe behind their protagonist-shields. What matters nations and ideologies to this film when there is family drama to mine?

The Blue Angel

Saw The Blue Angel, a black and white film starring Marlene Dietrich. It follows a puffed-up fussy little professor who falls for a show-girl. The film first establishes the professor's character in a complex way: He is merrily whistling to his pet bird over coffee. The bird is not whistling back however and upon investigation, he discovers his bird is dead. Stricken, he holds it's body in his hand until his landlady brusquely tosses into the fire, noting "it stopped singing a long time ago anyway." This establishes the professor as fussy, vaguely effeminate, buffoonish, but also childish and tender-hearted. The plot of this film sounds like a dirty joke and for the first half of the film I was worried about who the joke was going to be on. Was the professor going to be fleeced by a sequined jezebel or would she bring some love and warmth into this absurd old man's life? Well, the film was made in the 30s, so that should answer that.

Indeed, this film is a tragedy. At first the professor is humbled for the better by his infatuation with the showgirl. He is made ridiculous, but doesn't mind burning off some of his dignity. The pork is whittled away from his personality. As the film goes on however, we hit the natural ending if this was meant to be a film about the saving power of love, and there's still an ominous half hour left to go. Throughout the courtship, there are faint clues that things will turn out well: Dietrich has a living bird in her apartment which sings like anything, suggesting a life of warmth and ease, but then again we have a shot of Dietrich brightening up when money is mentioned, and a baleful clown who is always on the periphery, the only other man in a company of women. When the professor first enters the nautically-themed nightclub where Dietrich performs, he is momentarily literally caught in a net.

This film is a fairly dismal morality play, warning us of the dangers of easy women. It climaxes in a heart-breaking performance by the professor in the burlesque show. This is a show-biz-ish film, preoccupied by the grand stand and the shallowness of illusions. We are meant to feel sorry for the ridiculous professor and, I suppose, to swear we will not be caught by the charms of an evil woman. It's very moving and well-constructed but, I think, a bit dated with its message. I suppose it might be considered sort of wickedly fun for a while, but those final scenes were just too brutal for me to laugh off.