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.