Blue Ruin

Saw Blue Ruin (thanks, Basil!) It was a revenge thriller following a hobo's quest for vengeance against a whole family that was responsible for his (the hobo's) parents' death. The hobo has gentle, enormous eyes and a hesitant demeanor. He is a good man. We can tell. His quest for vengeance is portrayed as the wild-west-style necessary evil that will right the world once more. The film contrasts his grisly deeds and his mounting sense of panic and desperation with the gorgeous wilds of Virginia. Just before charging in guns blazing, he glances at the sky, at the contrail of an airplane through the boughs of the evergreens, traveling straight in one direction.

I really enjoyed the film. It seems to follow an innocent man (well, sort-of innocent. He is complicit in the following mayhem after all) into a shadowy netherworld of backwoods justice and amateur legal and medical knowledge. We focus on the protagonist's incompetence, on his wounds and pain. His enemies are super-competent and painless. We follow his quest although we know it can have no happy ending. The film is lovely. Lyrical and light, yet suspenseful without cheap jump-scares to spoil the mood.

It's not a slam-dunk of a movie. Back-woods folk, for example, are not shown in the most flattering light which is unfortunate since I think there's a lot of overlap between action/thriller fans and gun-owners who would probably begrudge the stereotypes. But none the less, the film moves along with tension and quiet fascination. The best part of the film is just the minutia of the confrontations. He left the car keys just here, he moves to a new hiding spot just so. His silent movement around the streets and around houses is the best part of this film. A great little thriller.

Ink

Saw Ink, a very visual film about a secret war happening between the team that brings you good dreams (the storytellers, a multicultural group of dread-locked, fish-netted crew) and the bunch that brings you bad dreams (identical scientist-looking guys with big glasses and plastic surgical gowns who are for some reason called incubuses despite being not all that sexy.) Anyway, these two teams clash over a girl whose soul is stolen by a third agent, a dude with a huge black cloak and giant nose named Ink. Now the main character in all of this is the girl's father who is a Big Important Business Man who is working on closing the Hindersen Account (yes, the multi-billion-dollar Hindersen account!!)

I really wanted to like this film. It's visually rich, it builds a world that I'm actually interested in, it's definitely brave enough to try something different from the mainstream, but it's just killed by the script and performances. It's such a pity! The Big Important Business Man comes off as less of a titan of industry and more as just a weasel. He's prone to fits of swearing which are (I guess) supposed to show how tightly-wound he is but come of kind of shrill and bitchy. I mean, we're supposed to believe they trusted this guy with the Hindersen account? Also there's a mystic storyteller called "The Pathfinder" who is supposed to be zany and sarcastic in a sort of motor-mouthed way. He's completely atrocious.

This film would have been much better if it had been filmed in France, I think. The French are much more used to whimsy in their films (see for instance Amelie, Mood Indigo, A Town Called Panic) which would have provided more talent and more readily available money. Also, if they were all speaking French, I wouldn't be able to spot the protgaonist's wimpy performance so easily. He would just be talking French and I could gather his meaning from the subtitles. Perfect. As is, the film is a kid's film that the kids will one day be bewildered by. A promising but sadly lumpy mess.

Walkabout

Saw Walkabout, a pastoral film about a teenage girl and her younger brother who get lost in the Australian outback. The film opens with the sounds of didgeridoos and animal cries played over footage of a city. A particular man is focused on: suited, middle-aged, fussy. He is somehow involved in a mining operation. Mining is used here (and later, near the end of the film) as a symbol of modern man's disregard for and destruction of nature. Anyway, the girl and boy are lost in the outback. They shall undergo The Walkabout which is (we are informed in an opening title-card) a spiritual journey undertaken by the Aboriginals to attain adulthood. Yes, these two kids are to be saved.

Specifically, they're to be saved by an Aboriginal dude who comes along to help them out for absolutely no reason. He of course doesn't want them to die, but once they're out of the desert and into some jungly forest, it seems like they might be able to take care of themselves. Anyway it sort of seems cheap that these kids survive The Walkabout solely because they had help every step of the way. Does that count as a true Walkabout? Anyway, the exoticization of the Aboriginal dude continues as he is made into a symbol for the wilds of Australia. He goes into full-blown weeping Indian mode at one point, witnessing the lazy (and therefore useless and invalid) hunting of a bunch of water buffalo. I feel the film's heart is in the right place but, like that 70s ad I liked, it's approach leaves something to be desired.

Anyway, the film is mostly about these two kids surviving and getting in touch with nature which, this being the 70s, means getting naked a lot. This also leads to a lot of footage of the girl swimming about in the nude which is only a symbol of her spiritual freedom and return to nature, man. It has nothing to do with her being hot (oh and also here, check out this panty-shot. Wink wink.) It also means a subdued but romantic relationship with the Aborigine which must have been pretty damn edgy for 1971) Every so often we flash over to civilization for these strange, overly-bright, David Lynch-ish scenes of antiseptic cleanliness and calm unpleasantness. The boy and girl also lug around a radio (another symbol of decadent Modern Man) which at one point describes the incredibly cruel process of preparing an ortolan and later jabberingly recites mathematical formulas. Oh Modern Man! When will you ever learn?

So I didn't think much of this film. It was beautiful and well-shot. It's not lazy or unimaginative, but it's got a one-note message of condemnation for basically anything that's the result of refining. I find this message insulting and naive, especially as its suggestion is for us all to abandon the cities for the trees. This would result in a lot more happiness perhaps, but also in a lot less people, and a lot more dead babies. Oh well? I do agree that the environment is in a bad shape and that we could all do to be more sincere and emotional and less materialistic, but let's have some restraint even in that, okay? The sexism and racism is just the perfect 1970s cherry on top. They are positive stereotypes at least, but it's still sex/racism underneath. Ah well.

Aparajito

Saw Aparajito, an Indian film from the 50s, film number two of the Apu trilogy, based on the autobiography of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. This is the last one I've seen however as I didn't prioritize the integrity of this series. It's too bad though because it's such a rich series. This one follows the protagonist Apu as he becomes a young man. After a childhood in the bustling city of Varanasi, he and his mother move out to the country where he enrolls in a school and turns out to be quite gifted. After an adorable learning-about-the-world montage, he receives a scholarship for college. At college in Calcutta is where the real meat of the film is found. Apu struggles with his rural youth. He clearly resents the small-town atmosphere and loves the sophistication of the city (to say nothing of and the university.) He loves his mother, who still lives out there, but resents her pathetic loneliness, her silent aura of guilt that she holds over him. There's a scene where Apu's mother speaks movingly to him, only to find that he has drifted off to sleep mid-soliloquy. This is a cruel scene to include in an autobiography, and one that must have been invented. The author has let us know that he has not forgiven himself, that he still feels guilt.

It's funny to talk of the author of the book that a film is based on but the film has a very literary tone. The acting and shooting are fairly workaday. There are some excellent shots, but very little visual cleverness. Most of the interesting parts of the film come from evocative scenes, such as when a young Apu feeds monkeys in a temple. They scamper up chains, hung with bells. The bells ring out, seemingly blessing Apu, celebrating him. These early scenes illuminate Apu's struggle with his humble past and by extension with his humble mother. He's trying to escape his past but that's what formed him, the blessing of the monkeys, and long walks along the Ganges listening to priests and hucksters and fitness buffs, each representing a philosophy, a rich collage of ideas.

This is such a rich film. I feel like I've barely scratched the surface and already there's plenty to keep me interested. It's not a crowd-pleaser of course. It's set 8000 miles away from me and 87 years in the past, so it's a tad dry. Like a good book, you have to work a bit for the themes but if that sounds like a good time to you, check it out. A rich, fecund film.

Back to the Future Part III

Saw Back to the Future Part III, the western one. It was a jolly little film, wrapping up the series with little lessons and check-box-ticking. It feels a little pedantic sometimes, as it gets into the details of how exactly they jumped forward and backward in time. Those moments felt less like a story and more like watching someone finish a Sudoku puzzle, but thankfully these moments are brief. The rest of the film is Marty and the Doc running about, creating ice and shooting bad guys. The film is jolly, like I say.

I don't have that much to say here. The film was entertaining. I liked how dirty the wild west was even as it was perhaps sanitized and romanticized. I would have like to see someone suffering from scurvy or diphtheria or something. Also it's a damn lucky thing both Marty & Doc are white males. I wonder what the film would have been like if Doc Brown were black? Anyway, this is clearly not that kind of film. Rather, it's the fluffy entertaining kind and in that endeavor it succeeds admirably. A fun little film.

Blue is the Warmest Color

Saw Blue is the Warmest Color (thanks, Basil!) It was a French romance following a young lesbian becoming aware of her sexuality and finding her first girlfriend at the same time. It was a sweet film, capturing not only the thrill of first romance but also the intricate complexity of longer-term relationships. I recognized and loved the nervousness of the protagonist stepping into a gay bar for the first time. The excitement but also the dread. The stakes are higher and the game is for keeps now. Well-observed, well-acted stuff.

I enjoyed the film's slow deliberate pace and quietly explosive performances. The naturalistic style stops it from being truly operatically melodramatic, but the sudden silences and quiet mumbled words almost speak louder than shouts and thrown dishes. Apparently the director tortured the actresses a bit to get these performances, demanding hundreds of retakes and I think that's really a bit much (they are professional actresses, you know) but you can't argue with the results.

I've read some condemnations of this film, claiming it was essentially soft-core lesbian porn for straight men and I can see where those criticisms are coming from. The protagonist is a makeup-less but very pretty girl and her girlfriend is kind of tomboyish but also quite attractive. The sex scenes are protracted (I mean) and there aint no 200 pound bull-dyke ushering this blossoming young lady into womanhood. In fact I can't recall anyone at all in the film who is physically ugly. Whatever. This isn't as progressive as it might be. It is however extremely touching and sweet, if perhaps straight-washed a tad.

Barbarella

Saw Barbarella, a goofy, stupid, sexy little scifi/fantasy. It was very coy and cutesy in a leering 60s-ish sort of way. Barbarella, as an illustration of what I'm talking about, is gorgeously beautiful and lives in a post-war civilization, where love is the order of the day. Ah but in this future people only have sex by placing their palms together and letting drugs do the rest, so even though Barb is an amiable sex-bomb, she is also a virgin you see. It's a tad gross but it's also cute and stupid, like a fluffy little dog humping your leg. At any rate, it's not really for me.

For me this was a frustrating film. It's very imaginative and campy and glorious fun and I wanted to like it but I kept waiting for the endless exploitation of this one women to finish at last and for the male characters to get their turn! This of course never happens. I have nothing against soft-core porn mind you. I just wish there were more - featuring men. There is this attractive winged dude in Barbarella, which is nice, but he spends most of the film being some halfassed crypto-Christ figure. Not the most erotic of characters. The film mostly focuses on the lovely young Barb who spends most of her time changing costumes, being in mortal danger that invariably results in her clothing being stripped off. It's fun and naughty just not very inclusive. But that's the nature of the beast. I'm not surprised, just frustrated.

Picnic at Hanging Rock

Saw Picnic at Hanging Rock. It's one of those films about a mysterious disappearance. This time it's a period piece in which a small group of girls from a nearby boarding school vanish somewhere in Hanging Rock, a volcanic rock formation of twisting passages and towering pillars. The disappearance happens quite early on and is the culmination of a sequence of increasingly strange shots. The girls mumble half-intelligent statements while gazing out into the distance. Synthesizers swell on the soundtrack (a marked departure from the usual pastoral, classical music that forms the rest of the soundtrack.) As with other vanishing person films, the vanishing itself is merely the frame and the backstory to the actual plot which is the fallout of the vanishment.

The film is slow and calm. The girls are symbolically linked with swans, gliding calmly and serenely about, calm and beautiful and untouchable. The film is the same, drifting in either a lulling or maddening way, depending on your temperament. The mystery of the disappearance is all-consuming and all-destroying. One little English lord (he must be about 17) goes hunting for them and nearly dies in the process. His only prize: a scrap of lace. Everyone connected with the mystery ends up suffering.

I'm not sure what to make of this film. It's poetic, dramatic, unsettling, certainly not bad. It's very slow which I think hampered my enjoyment a bit, and it's a bit too in love with the beautiful, beautiful girls. The central struggle of the film really seems to be between the cruel headmistress of the girls' school and a roommate of one of the missing girls, but these seemed too straightforward and simple to me. The old battleaxe vs the sensitive soul? I wonder who wins. I can't really tell what the film was doing which is good, I think, but I also couldn't follow it and became confused and grumpy. Perhaps I'm just getting too old to accept the heavy theme of ambiguity in this film.

Strike

Saw Strike, a communist propaganda film by the ever-effective Sergei Eisenstein. This one follows a strike at a factory of some kind. It's not really clear what the workers are unhappy about until their demands are read out (and roundly guffawed at by a quartet of fat plutocrats) mid-way through the film. It turns out to be eminently reasonable 8-hour days, and a perhaps-less-reasonable 30% increase in wages (not being snide, I just don't know economics.) Anyway, this is ignored by the plutocrats and they counter by wakening their capitalist sleeper-agents, known by colorful code names such as "the king," "the monkey," "the owl" and so forth. These agents are the comic relief. They bumble and grimace at the camera, always completely (prat-)falling for the attractive workers' traps.

Anyway, you can imagine how the film goes. It's aim is to rabble-rouse, so the workers, despite being obviously nobler, smarter, and more attractive than their foes, somehow begin to suffer terribly in the third act, when our sympathies are played on. Eisenstein as usual conducts an awesome crowd scene. He's more of a choreographer than a director, I feel. He relies entirely on crowd scenes and flashing montages. We don't even know the characters well enough to know their names, let alone judge their reactions. That said, the crowd scenes are great. Not as strong as the Odessa Steps scene in Battleship Potemkin, but the strike breaking scenes are quite stirring enough.

An interesting film, a bit too cartoonish for me (especially the business with the sleeper agents. That's just ridiculousness on top of ridiculousness) but entertaining. Also it contains a fair number of attractive Russian guys, which is nice, and a scene where one of the workers is seduced into becoming an agent of the factory-owners that features midgets dancing on a caviar-laden table. I don't think I would have seen that in any other film.

Also, bonus, the whole thing is on youtube, which is how I saw it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLiNKaUp0AA