Paper Moon

Saw Paper Moon, an adorable film made in the 70s, set in the 40s, about a con-man and his child side-kick grifting their way across prohibition-era America. The film is as charming as it sounds. The developing and deepening relationship between conman and girl follows the expected arc from grumpy placation and glaring silences to the girl participating in the grifts and saving his hide more than once. The film is not terribly surprising, however the point is not to surprise you but to melt your heart and in this it succeeded for me anyway.

The little girl won an oscar for her performance and it's easy to see why. Normally child actors are basically wooden mannequins. They don't know how people behave yet so you can see them mechanically perform the actions that some assistant director screamed at them. Say line, laught, frown, smile. This girl's role calls for a lot of sulking which is easy to do (you just stare and frown) but you can see her struggling to fit into traditional female roles and her performance in general is just head and shoulders above other child actors'. Allegedly, this was accomplished by hundreds of takes and editing, which must have been miserable all around.

The film reminded me of Leon The Professional, although far less edgy, and of The Sting, but with less plot-twists and more heart-warming. It's definitely entertaining however and deserves a look.

Great Expectations (1946)

Saw Great Expectations (1946), an adaptation of the famous Dickens story which follows the protagonist Pip's adventures being thrust into high society and then back out again. Throughout the story children are made into wealthy individuals. Contrasted with the protagonist is the love interest Estella, who is being raised to be heartbreaker by the sinister Miss Havisham.

The film feels very professional. It's not bad, but it's not terribly exciting either. It feels like a fairly rote recitation of the story, well done but stiff and over-rehearsed. I feel like I'm meant to draw some meaning or lesson from the film but I don't know what that might be. Pip becomes rich, learns the identity of his benefactor, fails to melt Estella's icy heart. It all seems like a bunch of stuff that happens. There's some words to be said about class and how kindness is separate from that and perhaps in Dickens's time that was enough but today it feels a bit limp.

This limpness is revealed to be systemic by the weak ending. The ending of a prestige film like this needs to wrap everything up in a coherent way and this film fails to do so here. Questions of class and wealth and upbringing are swept aside as the love story takes centre stage. Apparently Dickens himself changed the ending post-publication and this film's screenwriting team had trouble with the ending as well. Without some viewpoint or message, it's a tricky story. It's not really fun enough to be a romp and not coherent enough to be a lesson. It's just a bunch of stuff that happens.

So, the film was alright, just stiff and kind of lifeless. Some of the scenes and characters are perfect (Mr Jaggers is perfect and Miss Havisham is pretty good too) but most of the film is just things happening kind of at random. I think I missed the point here.

The Pianist

Saw The Pianist, a fairly harrowing WW2 film about Adrien Brody, the famous pianist jewish pianist, who is trying desperately to survive in Poland. The film starts with him at the top of the world, the film richly saturated in color, Adrien suavely playing piano in a busy diner. Soon though jews are not welcome in some shops, and jews are not allowed in public parks, and armbands, and registries. Midway through the film, his family is vanishing and color and background music fade from the film.

The movie tries to tell a general story of Poland in the war and so it feels fairly impersonal at times. The protagonist, apart from being a piano player, is a cypher, a blank space for us to project ourselves into. He survives and his survival is not pretty but neither is it particularly challenging. He never has to sacrifice a stranger, for example, to save his own skin. Indeed, the protagonist twice expresses a desire to die rather than to leave his house, never mind sacrificing his morals. This was based on an autobiography, so perhaps that's why.

The nazis in the film are generally attractive, which is weird. Somehow the image of the nazi officer in popular imagination is always impeccably dressed, supremely capable and confident, and strikingly handsome. this image must originate from nazi propaganda. I wonder if we're unwittingly repeating that propaganda.

Anyway, handsome nazis aside, this film is quite sad but not terribly brutal. There's times when I cried, but I was never horrified. Come And See hit me harder for some reason, and of course there's no beating Shoah for depth of information. On an unrelated note, I wish youtube movies would disable comments on movies. In the comments section of this film someone started a well-thought-out argument about Israel which is a sort of sour finisher for such a noble, sad film.

Visitor Q

Saw Visitor Q, another strange film from Takashi Miike. This one follows a small family of father, mother, son and daughter who exist in some kind of cruel, violent reality. The on is being bullied and takes his aggression out on his mother. The daughter is a prostitute. The father is a recently disgraced reporter who was sexually assaulted while reporting on youth culture. For no reason, some man at a train station hits the father over the head with a rock. This rock-wielding stranger comes to stay with the family for a while.

The universe is dismal and hyper-violent, but in a cartoony way, like the Death of Mary Queen of Scots sketch. As the film progresses, things become more dark and more violent. It's fairly upsetting if you start taking it seriously. Lucky for me, I knew what to expect going in and was only smugly self-satisfied when confronted with the sexual violence, and the knee-deep pools of breast milk. Ah Takashi, I would expect nothing less from you!

The film is dream-like. The plot makes little to no sense but the visuals are very striking and I've genuinely not seen another film like this one. The through-line of the film is the family overcoming their struggles and differences and becoming closer together by descending into a sublimely violent state. This is a neat little surprize but feels like the backwards morals of Oscar Wilde's sayings or of the Marquis De Sade's stories. They're basically jokes, relying on shock and expectation-upsetting, but not really bearing up to any scrutiny and certainly not meant to be taken seriously.

This was a fun film. Not for everyone of course, but a nice little joke while it lasts.

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

Saw The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, another brilliant film from studio Ghibli. This one tells the story of a bamboo-cutter who finds a little girl in one of the bamboo shoots, along with fine silks and a supply of gold pieces. The girl grows into a young woman in the span of about two days and the bamboo-cutter decides that she is a princess and is meant for the Big City. In the Big City, she's a hit. Everyone loves her but she clearly pines for the carefree days of her youth, running about with the other children and listening to the wind in the trees.

As in other studio Ghibli films, nature is used as a shorthand for purity and a kind of effortless spiritual fulfillment. It's very nice. The honest woodcutters and such are shown as being similar to the pheasants and foxes in that they too do not wonder about the purpose of their lives or their place in the world. This placement of laborers in with the animals is a little weird, but that's Japan for you I guess.

At any rate, this is a sweet, nostalgic film in the vein of My Neighbors The Yamadas. The art style is loose and impressionistic, looking like an illustrated scroll come to life. I think a few scenes are directly lifted from manuscripts and tapestries. As usual for fancy-anime, this is swooning and lovely. No one is hurt who doesn't deserve it, nothing truly bad happens, and we end on a great crane-shot, zooming out to show the whole of the world, loving and dyning and us humans in with it. It's all a mess, but a glorious one.

The Servant

Saw The Servant, a nice little psychodrama about an indolent young aristocrat who hires a butler. This butler at first seems to be a sort of Jeeves, a knowing and loyal servant who smiles at his master's foibles and who is subseriant but who of course knows best in the end. We the audience are allowed to see this mask slip a few times however. We're allowed to see how his smiles fade and how he smugly grins when the aristocrat refuses his own girlfriend's medical advice in favor of the butlers'. Soon the butler is using his master's bedroom and is introducing his "sister" who is a maid.

The film's sympathy is clearly on the side of the aristocrat who is fleeced by this conniving butler. As the aristocrat falls prey to the butler's machinations and to his own vices (booze) the soundtrack weeps with violins and the camera leeringly lingers on his wretched face. All the same however, I didn't have a ton of sympathy for this guy who wasn't just showing this butler the door. There's meant to be a kind of abusive relationship caused by the ironical reversal of power, but the law and society are on the aristocrat's side. It feels victim-blame-y but can't this guy just cook his own food?

The point of the film basically seems to be to highlight the deeply fraught situation of having servants in your house. If they aren't stealing the silverware outright, then they're laying more sinister, long-term plans. I sort of can't imagine having servants around my house at all, so this seems like a sensible danger to highlight to me. It is sort of dated however.

At any rate, the film is nice and taught. The drama is good and the hysterics are theatrical and nice. I enjoyed the film, even if it was a bit dismal, and I was invested in the characters. Sort of an aging film, but still a nice one for the moment. Better catch it quick before it sours entirely!

Samurai Spy

Saw Samurai Spy, the last of the samurai movies I'll see for a while. It followed a ninja (or is he a samurai??) who is caught up in the shadowy assassination plots and spy rings of two rival powers. The film is mostly boilerplate samurai stuff. There's the usual sword fights and goofy sidekicks and women who somehow cannot resist the charms of the sullen, scowling hero. Many samurai films have been adapted into westerns (Seven Samurai of course, and Yojimbo) but this one feels much more like a gangster film. Rather than being isolated and remote, as with the westerns, this film is too densely packed, with everyone on top of each other, always running into an agent or counter-agent.

The film is very shadowy, both in terms of plot and in terms of filming. The first glimpse of the protagonist we get is of him striding through the fog, flickering in and out of sight. We see the main characters often in silhouette, reduced to shadows. The characters are engaging in shadowy, hidden work and are thus, appropriately enough, most often found in shadows, or fading into the mist. Appropriately, the climax is at a masked carnival and the ending has the characters fighting in the fog once more.

The film was not that interesting to me. The shadowy cinematography shows up immediately and never goes anywhere. A lengthy pre-credits exposition overwhelmed me immediately. It explained who the two factions were and why they were fighting and who was the head of which but I think ultimately it doesn't matter that much. Man A is fighting man B. 'Nuff said. Unfortunately, this film spent a lot of time twisting the plot and revealing characters to be double/triple/quadruple agents. There were some nice high-speed camera shots, but it was a samurai film after all.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Saw Tetsuo: The Iron Man, a low-budget, Japanese art/horror film about a man who hits a "metal fetishist" with his car. For the metal fetishist, this is bitter-sweet. On the one hand, he's upset because he's been injured, but on the other, how appropriate and perfect, that his life should end because of a giant, perfect engine bearing down on him. The title sequence is shown after this, with do-wop 50s music playing over close-ups of the car's grill and headlights.

The film continues with the haunted protagonist slowly being consumed by bits of scrap metal. The feel of the film is sinister and playful. Industrial landscapes and sounds evoke early David Lynch. The abundant body horror reminds me of a messier Cronenberg. In addition to these elements, the use of found props and stop-motion reminds me of Michel Gondry. A heady mixture!

As far as metaphorical meaning is concerned, the film could have something to say about industry vs nature (both in an environmental and human angst sort of sense) but mostly the film is full of aggressive montage, special effects, and wild sex scenes. The sex is frankly exploitative, btw. There are some gay subtexts, but only to the end of making the viewer uncomfortable.

It's a relatively short film, clocking in at 70 minutes or so. It hit hard and fast, opening with some truly uncomfortable scenes and progressing into a full-scale, globally apocalyptic climax. The subject matter feels fairly sinister but to my Western eyes, it seems too goofy to be threatening. It's less Saw and more Day of the Dead. At one point, a monster emerges from a woman's torso, holding a bouquet of flowers. How bizarre.

Wolf Children

Saw Wolf Children, a cute little anime about a woman who falls in love with a werewolf man and gives birth to two little werewolf children. The father then vanishes, leaving this poor woman to raise two children who turn into dogs half of the time. She lives in the countryside however, so they're able to keep their secret for a while. The children however are caught between two worlds themselves. They are partly wild animals but they are also partly humans. They struggle to make both halves cohere.

The film is really nostalgic and cute. The soundtrack is full of piano and women's voices. The visuals are packed with studio Ghibli-style super-naturally beautiful nature, as though the whole world had been polished and painted. Nature and weather patterns feature heavily in the story, often causing a major plot movement. Wolves are used to symbolize a more pure connection to nature that the children have which the rural humans, with their plastic ponchos and rubber boots, are lacking. Tellingly, we are informed that there are no more wolves in Japan. (Oh, how we have lost our way!)

True to the nature of melodramatic Asian cinema, there are several sustained attacks on your heart strings. Late in the film, I began to rebel against the overwhelming cutesy-ness of it all, but I think by that point you're supposed to have already cried and to be willing to let the film get away with murder.

So this film is a winner. It's mostly a giant scoop of sugar with enough sad bits in so that you can feel comfortable happy-crying later. The visuals are amazing, the atmosphere of the film is great, and the characters are enough of a cypher that you can project onto them. Not a film with a lot to say, but a nice film and one I'll probably show other people some day.

The Red Desert

Saw The Red Desert, a film by Antonioni. It follows a pretty woman who is having some kind of breakdown. Her husband owns a factory of some kind and she spends much time wandering in the gravel nearby it, gazing into septic pools, filled with solvents and waste. She is overcome and anxious about everything. The nature of her problems aren't fully explained and are left ambiguous with teasing hints to guide us. She seems alienated, unsure what people want from her or who she is. This ties in neatly with the industrial landscapes and plastic, blocky, modern decor of her house. Much ink has been spent on alienation in an industrial world and the film even opens with a worker's strike. Is the disorder of the factory mirrored in this woman's mind?

Then again she spends a lot of time in the ruins of nature. The only time we see green trees, they are interrupted by a ship passing through them. The canal carrying the ship is recessed, making the ship look like it's eerily passing through the forest itself. We know she used to hang out in a beautiful, isolated beach. Is she mother earth, upset by her own destruction?

There's many recurring themes. Boats show up many times, as does this radio broadcast from Saturn: It suggests isolation from other people, from nature, from society in general, perhaps even from herself. She is the hook to draw us into the world's problems.

The film itself is a bit slow and self-indulgent. It's interesting to watch this woman freak out over and over and it's interesting to see modern (circa '64), industrial Italy. I'm more used to the urban Italy of Fellini or Pasolini. I was frustrated by my inability to make the film cohere however. There's too many threads for me to tie them all together. I think this was meant to be a bit vague, but not as vague as I'm feeling about it. I feel there's a message where there might just be a meditation. Anyway an interesting film, full of threads to pull on. A great conversation starter.

Edit: oh yeah and some creepy 60s sex. She doesn't really resist, but she's in the middle of a full-blown freak-out, so enthusiastic consent, this is not. It's not as rapey as some contemporary films (looking at you, Goldfinger) but it hasn't aged well.

Samurai Rebellion

Saw Samurai Rebellion, a samurai film about a family who is asked to marry one of their sons to one of their lord's unruly wives. They begrudgingly accept but once the woman arrives, she's a lovely lady. It turns out she was unruly because the lord split up her previous relationship to have her to himself. But now that she's integrated into the new family, the lord demands her back again. Her son is next in line for the lord-ship and so she has to taken from her husband's side and shipped back to the castle. Boy that stinks.

Shockingly for a samurai movie, the film does not involve assassinating bureaucrats in transit at all! There is a big fight in the denouement and much political machinations, but the core of the film is the seering injustice done to this woman and to this family. The lords and powers that be keep making vague allusions to increased fiefdoms and greater money, but these promises are always for some golden tomorrow and never materialize today.

Once again, the authority of some middle-manager is questioned. The Emperor knows nothing of this provincial squabble of course and much energy is spent preventing word from reaching him. The Emperor would surely be just and fair, it's just these middlemen who are so shockingly corrupt. Even worse than them are the confederates in the household: a scheming mother in law and an easily manipulated (and physically ugly) brother.

I enjoyed this film. It was a bit of departure from the conventional samurai story (thank god) and the plot was more like a chess match than a brawl. There were subtle feints and counter-feints delivered via letter, rather than via sword-point. I think normally I would have been too groggy to keep track of these baroque plotlines, but I was alert enough today. Interesting film.

Santa Sangre

Saw Santa Sangre, a weird weird film by Jodorowsky, creator of such weird-fests as Holy Mountain and El Topo. This one follows a boy magician who is the son of a knife-thrower and a religious cult leader/trapeze artist. He witnesses his mother's arms being cut off and becomes his mother's arms. This is played out via semi-grotesque vaudeville routines where the boy stands behind his armless mother as she smokes or eats or plays the piano.

The film is one of a fine tradition of Mexican psychodrama/horrors. It's not terribly horrific, but there's nonsensical armchair psychiatry explanations for the protagonist's actions and endless arm-related references. There's also a great abundance of Freudian symbolism. At one point the protagonist, face contorted with horror, pulls a boa constrictor out of his pants.

The film is more interested in weird imagery however. The trappings of the circus are used liberally, with mincing clowns, self-serious dwarves, and garish face-paint used to unsettle the viewer. It's not very scary or thrilling however and many times the film totally bogs down to focus in on some spectacle. The images are neat however, so it's worth a look, just don't put it into your midnight horror marathon. A strange, fun film full of strange, fun images!

Colorful

Saw Colorful, a cute film about a spirit who is injected into the body of a recently suicided school boy. The spirit has no knowledge of this kid's previous life and personality, what drove him to suicide, but must live a "good life" to be reconsidered for the karmic wheel. So most of the film is taken up with the spirit discovering this kid's past and dealing with the many problems this kid was facing.

The film is prettily drawn and naturalistic. The spiritual stuff is mostly handled in the intro and by a supernatural little boy character who is basically a narrator that only the protagonist can see. The boy's problems mostly revolve around his love life and his relationship to his mother. This leads to some super-uncomfortable scenes where the increasingly visibly suffering mother tries to apologise for whatever drove him to suicide by making him elaborate western-style dinners. The spirit in the boy's body, despite not knowing this woman, hates her and bullies her mercilessly. As the plot unfolds, we find she's not exactly blameless but those scenes sure are painful to watch. I think she's meant to be so cringing and pathetic that we don't feel bad for her, but this only heightens the pathos for me.

Anyway, apart from all of that, the film is a sort of optimistic, sweet, coming-of-age film about second chances and living fully. The colors of the title refers to a kind of tortured metaphor about people being made up of many pigments. Because the protagonist is inheriting the suicidal boy's life, it doesn't really care about that life, but as it grows (and, as a child grows) it becomes aware that its actions have consequences which make it feel shitty.

The film is a sweet melodrama. Things are kind of overwrought, but we start out with some sort of situation that would drive a kid to suicide, so the stakes are already high. A sweet little movie.

Loves of a Blonde

Saw Loves of a Blonde, a Czech film about a blonde girl's romances. She starts off dating a kind of rough boy who has a scooter. She then meets up with a trio of middle-aged army men. Lastly, she meets up with a younger pianist. The film is not a comedy but has comical parts. The girl is a factory worker during the Stalinist period. She's cloistered with other girls and clearly interested in having a relationship. The army men are explicitly sent to the village to cheer the women up and obliquely (I believe) to produce more sons for the war effort. The women are treated as livestock, kept closed up and guarded through social convention and manipulation until they pair up. At one point, a woman turns into a mannequin in a TV show. Women are objects.

So what of this woman? She is young and looking for her first serious boyfriend. She's startled by the pushiness of her first boyfriend and put off by the unstated but unsubtle expectations of the middle-aged army men. The pianist is kind and clumsy, clearly trying to be manipulative but in a kind of endearing, inept way. Even so, a casual teenage romp is not very acceptable in 1960s Prague. She's in trouble no matter where she turns.

The film sounds kind of dismal but it's comical. There's long circular arguments where men harangue each other and swap sides of the argument. The army men send a bottle of wine to the blonde and her friends but the idiot waiter gives the bottle to a trio of dowdy ladies instead. The theme is depressing but the subject matter is pleasant enough. It is a Czech comedy from the 60s, so don't expect audible laughter, but it's hardly a depression-fest.

I found the film a little dower but winning. It wasn't the prestige piece I was expecting, but more winsome and kind of sweet. The inevitable social opprobrium is delivered in a goofy way, via henpecked husbands and nagging wives. The film acknowledges everyone's failings but in an indulgent, kind way which may have been revolutionary for all I know. Maybe, the film says, we don't have to be so uptight?

Sword of the Stranger

Saw Sword of the Stranger, a very pretty anime about a nameless man with a sword (so cool!) protecting a little boy who is some kind of Chosen One. Against them are a troupe of villainous Chinese warriors who have guns and take drugs to numb their pain (what decadence! Boo! Hiss!) Also involved are the Japanese officials who only get in the way (this film was made in 2007). All of that is just window-dressing however. The real reason for the film is the fight scenes.

The film is beautifully drawn and animated. Each gout of blood is individualized and drawn true-to-life. Each broken arm realistically dangles from its sockets. At one point, a guy's hand cuts cut nearly in half and the other half dangles from his stump, like two halves of a sausage, held together by the skin. The non-fighting scenes are done fairly well. I never felt a character was behaving unrealistically, and I never got lost in the plot, even thought the plot gets quite knotty at parts. But when we fight, we get swooning orchestras, keening wood flutes, and visual metaphors. The fights don't totally overwhelm the picture but I feel the film started out as a series of fights and a plot was invented post facto to hang them all together.

The macguffin which the boy is the Chosen One for grants immortality and so there's some nice philosophical jabbing back and forth about who really wants to live forever and what they would do with all that time. This is nice juxtaposition with the fights which are all to-the-death (naturally.) The film is very violent, but mostly pretty. It was a sort of over-indulgent film, packed with overwrought emotions and badass posturing. I thought it was kind of silly, but of course I did. A very pretty film.

Begotten

Saw Begotten, a grainy sort of art film that opens on a man killing himself. He seems to be cutting his own throat, but the film quality is so poor and so grainy that he may well be squirting chocolate sauce on his neck. Once he is dead, a woman emerges from behind a curtain and copulates with him. The film carries on like this, mixing sex and death and being fairly repulsive along the way.

It's got a fair share of arresting images which I really liked but unfortunately these images are usually milked past the point of yielding returns. Sometimes the symbolism of a film is the most direct way of talking about abstract things, but here I feel the effect is too coarse, too grainy. It feels willfully obscure. The closing credits, for example, reveal the woman to be "mother earth". How are supposed to know this? We aren't.

The film feels like an overgrown music video. There are some interesting images and a general theme of death and rebirth becomes apparent, but it would have been better I think if it were cut to about a third the run-time and put to some music. Indeed Marilyn Manson, that great magpie of creepy images, has cannibalized this film for one of his music videos. As is, the soundtrack is mostly frog croaks and bird tweets. It's meant to evoke a bog (death a rebirth, see?) A slog of a film. It wouldn't stand up to much mockery. Approach with friends looking for a spooky time.

Samurai Assassin

Saw Samurai Assassin, another samurai film. True to form, this one also involved a conspiracy to murder a government official. However, it seems there's a mole in the assassination conspiracy. Who is the mole? Can it be the protagonist, a rough-mannered and penniless ronin, looking to make his name, or could it be the rich conspirator, who spends his days studying poetry and the blade in his mansion? I had my suspicions going in, but I won't spoil it for you.

This one also featured surprising family connections, gold-hearted geishas, and impossibly intricate clan/dojo/government schemes. Everyone is spying on everyone and I couldn't follow who these people were most of the time.

There's some obscure references to the changing times. The rich conspirator claims his motivation to be "readying Japan for the future" and talks of English and American trading vessels. The man who they want to assassinate also talks of himself being the only man who can usher samurais into the next era. Something's being referenced here if not outright commented on.

As you might guess, this one left me fairly cold. This at least partly my fault (I couldn't follow parts of the plot and didn't try to especially.) but also the film itself is very true-to-genre and cliche-riddled. It wasn't cliche-ed enough that I could predict plot points, but nothing really broke out of the rigid samurai-assassinates-a-government-employee mold (which I did not even know was a thing before I started on this list of samurai films.) I feel like I've seen all of these parts before.

In a Year with 13 Moons

Saw In a Year with 13 Moons, a fairly dismal film by Fassbinder about a transsexual woman trying to find a place to fit in the world. We discover her in a relationship-ending fight with her current boyfriend and follow her life backwards from that point, eventually revealing what drove her to change her sex. We discover that she was abandoned by her parents and left in a bureaucratic limbo by the German government. Unable to be adopted, she got a job in a slaughterhouse, and then as a prostitute, wryly remarking that she traded one job in the meat industry for another.

The film deals heavily with identity and reality (a theme that Fassbinder also explored in World on a Wire.) We see the relationship-ending argument from the start of the film be repeated in an old movie. Were the protagonist and her boyfriend merely repeating what they'd seen on TV? We see a shoot-out which turns out to be a film shoot, the characters talk of "becoming" someone for the sake of their lovers or friends, and of course the protagonist is a woman in a man's body (or is she?) The notion of a deeper reality behind the perception is visited again and again.

The film is fairly glum however. The protagonist just wants a niche to fit into but they are unsuccessful in everything; as a woman, as a man, as this one's lover, as that one's. Strangulation is another repeated concept, as circumstances close in on our protagonist.

There's a sense of nervousness to film, as it keeps worrying over the same ideas, visiting and revisiting them. Juxtaposition is used to give the film a surreal air and Fassbinder's camera is in no rush, preferring to wait and watch as events unfold in eternal longshots. The film is slow and dense, interesting but not exciting. I found it sort of a slog but it's definitely got something on under the surface.

Looking for Alibrandi

Saw Looking for Alibrandi, an Australian coming of age story about an independent-minded Italian girl butting heads with the powerful traditions of her family and also with the traditionalism of Australian society. As one of her friends bluntly puts it, "each sticks with their own stock."

Fathers and lovers feature prominently. Both have impacted the lives of the protagonist and her mother (and her mother's mother.) The girl herself goes to a Catholic school, once again re-enforcing this struggle of tradition vs modern times. She hopes to ace her exams and become a lawyer or a politician or someone respectable and enviable. She has been warned by her family not to let men ruin her life (as they have the lives of her ancestors) but she is of an age where guys are difficult to ignore. Indeed, the film revolves almost entirely around the relationship between her and the men in her life.

True to genre, the film is breazy and sort of strident. We are meant to be left with the feeling that everything will work out somehow or other, but this is not the most satisfying. The film is satisfying in its untidiness however. After all we can't always know what happens next. Even in films with satisfying endings we could ask "and then what?"

This is a fun, pleasant little film. It didn't blow me away but then the target demographic is teenagers feeling the oppressive burden of family ties. The fourth-wall breaking is nice and serves as a fun break from the drama. I enjoyed the drama itself, mostly because it frequently tips into melodrama. A fun film.

Cold Prey 2

Saw Cold Prey 2, a Norwegian horror film which picks up shortly after the events of the first film. As in the first film, this one takes its time building the characters and their relationships before introducing the Big Bad. Who the Big Bad is is also interesting by the way. Spoiler alert but they killed the baddy in the first film, so is it his ghost, his family, the surviving female perhaps, gone mad with PTSD? I won't spoil it but its a neat solution which feels clever and earned.

Anyway, the film is very by-the-numbers once it gets going. Fake-out scares give way to plot-relevant scares, adorable moppets are perpetually in grave danger, and doorknobs prove to be the most difficult thing to operate in the world. The film has few real surprises after the first half hour. There's a bit more mythos-building but it's stuff you could almost guess given that this is a horror film (troubled children! Mutilated animals!!)

There's one really nice shot in the rearview mirror of a car near the start that I really really liked, and a late-game fake-out which turns into a genuinely funny joke. Apart from that, very by the numbers.

Hitokiri

Saw Hitokiri, another samurai movie. This time we follow a down-and-out ronin who starts working for an ambitious and bloodthirsty clan which sets him to work killing their enemies. He reasons that with enough murder he's sure to get some high office when they finally gain control, but of course the clan has other plans.

Once again, the central conflict is between the individual protagonist and the corrupt powers that be. The clan is not explicitly corrupt, but they cynically exploit the protagonist's nobler instincts. They first exploit his ambition and then his sense of unease at all the murder. The protagonist is always caught between throwing himself into the role of assassin vs saving himself and retiring from this creepy clan.

The film is fairly long and, like many samurai films, has mob-film-levels of exposition detailing who is the council of where and who is who's niece or beloved or whatever. My attention was tested for the first half but once the psychodrama of the second half starts, as the protagonist faces their doubts about the clan and begins to turn on his masters, it picked up considerably. Not a bad film but, once again, this film felt sort of like homework. Only three more samurai movies to go!

Closely Watched Trains

Saw Closely Watched Trains, a sort of slice-of-life comedy about a boy who goes to work at a train yard in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. The film satirically juxtaposes glorious, martial songs against shoe-less soldiers, pigeons, sleeping dogs. The film is a comedy but, due to time and distance, does not really work well as a comedy. The comedy that I picked up on was alternately baudy, involving prostitutes and jilted men, or dry and absurdist. Not un-funny but not terribly entertaining. I found the life-or-death consequences of lifetime to work more effectively as a means of comedy. A boy is trying to kiss a girl but a bomb explodes. Now that's comedy!

The film keeps returning to the theme of humans ruining bureaucracy. This can be seen as a microcosm of the struggle against authoritarian fascism. Indeed, a sabotage scheme is a subplot of the film. The boy himself is naive and prone to blurting out embarrassing secrets, not realizing that they are secrets. As the film progresses, we get to see him "come of age" and enter into the same corruption that so shocked him before. This is portrayed as somewhat dismal, but only somewhat. By the time we reach that point of the film, we're firmly rooting for him to cheat the far-off fascists.

Not a bad film, bu not a gripping one either. It sort of felt like homework to me. Subtle but dry.

Romper Stomper

Saw Romper Stomper, a film that follows a gang of Australian neonazis. At the top of the film they are living the high life, intimidating bar owners and partying in their squat. Soon however they are beset by troubles which force them to retreat and retreat and retreat, their numbers dwindling as the remaining members become more desperate and dangerous. In this way, the film offsets the glamorization of the gang in the first half with their feral desperation in the second half. I noticed that all of their problems were both self-inflicted and entirely avoidable. The film follows them into a self-destruction that is literally filmed and spectated by fat, idle Asian tourists. It doesn't have to be read this way however.

This film doesn't really condemn the neonazi idiology. They get revenge on a pedophile. They shake their heads as they talk about what vibrant neighborhood this once was. Because we shadow them we inevitably have to sympathize with them. When they beat people their shouts are replaced by animal roars on the soundtrack. They project an aura of confidence and power. I imagine that to a teenage outcast who has not yet distinguished fear from respect this is an attractive group of people who would maybe be neat to hang out with. Even the ending can be read not as the self-destruction of the neonazis but as the self-destruction of "white culture". The bored tourists come off not as the ironic consequence of their self-destruction but as partly culpable, voyeuristic.

This is an entertaining film and not a careless one, however the message of a film is sometimes in the eye of the beholder and I don't think this film takes many pains to avoid being misread. At any rate it is beloved by some neonazis. One of those neonazis also compared himself to the protagonist of Clockwork Orange, a film that this film owes a debt to for its visual style. The film is luridly colorful, full of trashy plastic colors, garishly made-up women and graffiti. There's even a few Kubrick stares midway through.

This was definitely an entertaining film. It's heart is in the right place but I couldn't shake the feeling that its message was too artful, too subtly ironic. Perhaps I'm just being paranoid.

Cold Prey

Saw Cold Prey, a Norwegian horror movie about five 30-something-year-old teenagers who are stranded in an abandoned ski lodge and who are being hunted down by someone (or someTHING!!) It's not a bad film. They build up some backstory for the characters and give us some emotional ties to them. Since this is a horror film, of course these teens are mostly there to smooch and scream and although there's a fair amount of that, I found myself caring somewhat about their emotions (such is my weakness.)

The reveal of the Big Bad at the end of the film is telegraphed far off. I feel like on some level it doesn't really matter what's killing them and frankly that no explanation would be way creepier, but that's not satisfying to our sense of tidiness so the killer has to be identified. This identification happens so early on however that I don't know why they treat the reveal like a reveal. Okay, whatever.

This wasn't a bad film. It was tense and scary at times but fairly low stakes. It felt like a very by-the-numbers survival horror film. For genre fans only I think.

Samurai Wolf

Saw Samurai Wolf, the most "Western"-ish samurai film I've seen in a while. Westerns often steal from Japan but this one involved sheriffs, bandits, and hookers (with hearts of gold.) There's very little translation required in this case. So, it follows the titular samurai wolf as he wanders into a town which is (naturally) bedeviled by bandits. The samurai is a fairly easygoing dude who carries no money and cheerfully exchanges a few hour's wood-chopping for some food. He's constantly trimming his beard with some little sheers which I think is meant to hint at a tamed and civilized wolf. There's something of the beautiful beast about our hero. He is very physical and has that magical ability to stab flies mid-flight and instinctively parry an unexpected thrust.

I've suggested in previous reviews that the attitude towards authority was interesting in samurai films. Those concerns are kind of orthogonal to this film's attitude. This small town is instantly cowed by the samurai and he becomes the de facto lawmaker. The film was interesting - almost solid action. There are a few scenes where people lay out the plot but they are few and brief. The film knows what its audience wants.

Tristana

Saw Tristana, a Luis Buñuel film about a pretty girl, Tristana, who must go to live with a corrupt and decadent gentleman who takes her in after her own parents die. He is a proud, rich socialist. He rails against religion and insists that the poor must be looked after. He's far enough along with the sexual revolution to proposition his ward and insists that they must never marry, so great is his embrace of modernity. Of course his stance is fairly self-serving. He doesn't suffer from not marrying her. This is once again Buñuel using sex to skewer the smug, respectable progressives of his time.

As the film wears on, we see the effects of his treatment to her, both the effect on her and on him. The film is a kind of self-aware farse. The rich man complains that he doesn't want to "play the part" of a rich old fool. One of the servants is mute and communicates by wild gesticulation. The characters roughly fit the archetypes of the Commedia Dell'arte. This film has all the cruelty of a comedy but the cruelty is not funny as it would be in a comedy, but sinister and biting as in a melodrama. The protagonist herself calcifies into a sinister, wheelchair-bound spinster near the end.

The film was interesting but I think it got the better of me. I'm usually able to "solve" Buñuel's work simply by being aware of his hatred of the self-satisfied middle-class and his use of sexual perversion as a means to explode that self-satisfaction. Here however, the film is more realistic, feeling more like a melodrama or something. I can't quite fit everything together.

The Interview (1998)

Saw The Interview. Not the much-ballyhooed comedy about North Korea, but an Australian police procedural about a cat-and-mouse battle of wits between a cop and a man accused of being a serial killer. The film is a tightrope walk between confirmation bias and plausible deniability. The cop feels that this is his man and is not above using intimidation to get what he wants. On the other side is the police apparatus designed to prevent inadmissible evidence from being collected. We are intended to sympathize with the cop and to hate the foul poindexters who whine about "ethics" and "fairness".

Then again, we aren't allowed to know until quite late in the film if the accused is actually guilty. It may well be that this cringing mess of a man is telling the truth, that what the cop perceives to be his mask falling is just an ordinary desperate moment for a man in a stressful situation. IT's left pleasantly ambiguous for quite a while. People who like tidy resolutions be warned!

I enjoyed the film. The central conflict of letting a guilty man go vs an innocent man being locked up is not that interesting to me (I always imagine myself as the innocent man. What do I care if a random criminal is not in jail? MAny are not in jail.) but the film is nervy and interesting, always keeping you guessing.

Don't Torture A Duckling

Saw Don't Torture A Duckling, a so-called Italian Giallo film. Originally the film was titled Non si Sevizia un Paperino - Paperino being the Italian alias of Donald Duck who is greatly popular in Italy and features in this film as a plot point. Anyway, the film is a true-to-form Giallo, involving elements of horror, mystery, police procedural, and psychodrama.

The plot is that boys in this small village are being killed. Who's the murderer? The rich, idle woman? The crazy lady everyone calls a witch? The creepy groundskeeper? One of the sinister kids? The weirdly attractive priest? Who knows!? The film sets up the characters and then becomes a procedural. A mustachioed journalist pries and asks questions and eventually solves the mystery (uh... spoiler alert I guess.)

There's a theme of evil women. In addition to the witch lady, the bored rich woman jokingly propositions one of the boys. This film was made in the 70s, so it's just meant to be provocative and sexy, but simultaneously the boy is obviously intimidated and scared. In modern times of course this reads as frank harassment (if not abuse) but even in the context of the film it's portrayed as a kind of cruel thing to do. Women are often the subject of the film. Remote, untouchable, taunting, teasing. This ties into the killer's motives, but this sort of bothered me.

This film is very lurid. There's tits within the first 10 minutes or so and at one point a pretty lady is murdered by an angry mob. Her murder is filmed in a series of soft-focus close-ups, her head thrashing from side to side as blood splashes down her face. The violence is extreme but also obviously fake, halloween-tier stuff. The wounds are obviously painted on, but not a drop of red paint was spared. At one point someone falls down a mountain. We see what is obviously a dummy falling and then get a close-up of what is very very obviously a dummy. Later the dummy's head explodes. If it were realistic it would be disturbing but it's obviously wax, so the whole thing feels kind of formal, like seeing an actor take a sword to the armpit.

The film was a little clumsy. The payoff is good and there are themes at all which is always nice. I have a few Giallo films to see now. I wonder if they'll all be as silly and lurid. One can only hope!

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance

Saw Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance, a samurai-sploitation film that feels like an origin story. The plot only exists to set up the main character, an ex-official executioner who has been betrayed and framed by a rival clan. All of this serves to get us to the image of a samurai accompanied by a baby boy. This man and his son walk the path, we are told in an opening narration, between the raging river of vengeance and the fires of honor (or something I wasn't really listening.)

This fire and river talk is not terribly important however since this is so much window-dressing for some kick-ass fight sequences with gushing fountains of bright red blood and quite a few pairs of tits. Indeed, one sign of the protagonist's samurai prowess is his ability to sexually preform under pressure. Samurai-sploitation.

The film is fairly fun but feels like it's trying to set up a series. There's no real resolution and the action is episodic. The scenes are neatly divided into back-story and present day. The back story reveals his motivations and the present day scenes are just him righteously kicking ass. His motivations are almost irrelevant. Kick-ass samurai with a little boy. That's really all you need to know.

I've decided in previous samurai films that the attitude of the film towards authority is the most interesting thing to examine. This one has a government official (the protagonist executioner) betrayed by other officials (the rival clan, which acts as a kind of spy network.) I get the feeling that the natural order of things as determined by the government is usurped and thus peace is thrown into chaos. This suggests a reverence for authority which is reinforced by their frequent use of crests and seals to show power. At one point our hero faces down a crowd of attackers simply by wearing the proper insignia on his robe.

The authority itself however is almost totally absent from the film. The government only appears as a series of official proclamations - one of which is sliced in two by the protagonist. There's an almost objectivist attitude, that a single man is allowed to buck the bureaucracy if he's powerful and clever enough. Of course he becomes a sort of tragic outcast as a result however.

Most of the samurai films I've seen have had almost a disdain for authority. Officials are meant to be assassinated most of the time. In this film however, the assassination attempt is frustrated. I feel this is the schlocky sort of film which implicitly believes that might makes right. There's some notion of virtue that the rival clan lacks but largely justice comes in the form of a beheading. I don't quite agree with this point of view, but it makes for a fairly fun film. So it's got that going for it.

Accattone

Saw Accattone, a film by Pasolini. The title, Accattone, is a derogatory term for a someone who gets by on petty crime - a grifter. Accordingly, it follows a small-time pimp whose girl goes to jail. Without her, he resorts to small thefts, gambling, some paid work. The protagonist is unhappy through it all though. He basically has no desire to work, content to loaf around and chase girls. He's not an evil person and does not intentionally cause pain but he's often the agent and instrument of misery.

I had a hard time feeling anything about this film. This may stem from some failure in empathy, but I couldn't bring myself to particularly root for the protagonist (why doesn't he just get a job?) or to hate him. He's not a villain. The protagonist is a bum, yes, but he seems harmless. He cheats his friends mostly and they cheat him right back, laughing and lazing about.

The film opens with a bet about whether it's safe to swim after eating. One man insists it's fatal but Accattone laughs and bets him that he could survive. This is an encapsulation of the film. He's fatalistic but happy.

The Tracker

Saw The Tracker, a historical drama about a trio of white men hunting down an Aborigine in the Australian outback with the help of an Aboriginal man who is their tracker. As the title suggests, the tracker is the protagonist here and most of the film consists of him walking the razor's edge between trying to help the white men and trying to retain his humanity. The three white guys consist of a callow youth, a soggy old hand, and a psychotic general who is the villain. The general gets along very well with the tracker but their relationship is predicated on him being firmly in control. As soon as his authority wavers by the slightest, out come the manacles and bullwhip. For much of the film, we're not clear about what the tracker is doing. Has he sold out and is he now aiding the white men, or is he slyly wasting their time, letting their quarry escape?

The film is scored with a man's voice, accompanied by guitar, singing some fairly on-the-nose lyrics about freedom and "my people" and so on. An unusual choice for a period drama. The film also sometimes suddenly cuts away to crudely drawn pictures of the events, as if their budget had run out. This usually happens when violence occurs or is about to occur. I suspect the motivation may have really been budgetary or special-effects constraints, but the effect is eerie and jarring which - since this is usually when violence occurs - is entirely appropriate.

The film reminded me a lot of some of the more morbid westerns I've seen. Things are mostly kept lighter here, but motives are unclear and outcomes are uncertain. The four men are in hostile territory and, although the sun is shining and they are singing, it's unclear if they'll make it out alive. An interesting film. Not bad!

Gozu

Saw Gozu, a bizarre thriller/comedy about a yakuza who must kill his old mob-friend who is going insane. The friend kills a dog, in the opening, because he suspects this football-sized lap-dog of being a yakuza-hunting attack dog. So, this is sad, but what can our hero do? He brings his friend out to a small town where the murder is supposed to happen. Unfortunately, while the protagonist is making a phone call, his friend vanishes. This begins a nightmarish descent into small-town weirdness.

Some is straight-forward creepy craziness, such as the hulking, mute hotel-worker who makes lights dim as he approaches, but some is more comical-seeming. At one point an American woman is giving the protagonist directions. She speaks very halting Japanese and is revealed to be literally reading from queue cards. This is too weird to be taken seriously. The protagonist reads along with her incredulously before running off. This is a Takashi Miike film, so some level of bizarreness is expected. This has his usual mix of comedy and horror. There's some great Lynch-ian grumbles on the soundtrack, with sudden bursts of feedback and static indicating that weirdness is about to go down.

I think the film was primarily about putting weird shit on screen, but it also seemed to obliquely explore some latent attraction the protagonist had for his friend. They examine each other's genitals and homosexuals and anal penetration are used to horrify the audience. This may be just used for shock value but the film makes more sense to me as the protagonist struggling with his feelings for his friend. There's also some strangeness involving the titular minotaur who, I guess, lurks in the center of this small-town maze of craziness (and feelings!) It's very strange - definitely worth a look.

Harakiri (1962)

Saw Harakiri, a samurai movie that opens with a samurai asking a noble house for a place to commit harakiri. The nobles explain to each other that this is a scam - the samurai wants to be offered a job just to avoid the messiness of a harakiri. They examine his sword and find it's bamboo, his real sword has been pawned off years ago. In a fit of cruelty, they force him commit harakiri with the bamboo sword. His death is graphic, slow, and horrible. At this point, I was very excited. No more assassinations of bureaucrats, no chilly discussions of honor, this film was clearly willing to go someplace new.

The film makes good on its opening, continuing as a morbid and melodramatic film. The nut of the film is conflict between human nature and harsh, unyielding rules. This is reflected in the settings as well. The noble house is all strong, rigid beams and lines. When we see the protagonist's house, it's a poor hovel - all warped wood. The pillars are there, but the lines bend.

As with the other films (the bureaucrat assassination ones) this one comes down in opposition to authority, even giving us an unsatisfying ending to ensure that it sticks uncomfortably in our craw. The nobles, with their rigid dehumanizing view of samurais and the samurai code, are the clear villains.

Anyway, I liked this movie. It's very a-typical of the samurai movies I've seen from the 60s. It feels very modern, both in its sensationalism and in its handling of violence and in its anti-authoritarian message. This is a gem.

Wavelength

Saw Wavelength, an experimental, structural film which consists of a slow, 45-minute long zoom in to a photograph of the ocean that's hanging on the wall of a room. As this happens, a tone is played which gets higher and higher the closer we get. There's also some business with adding filters to the film, to make it brighter inside the room, outside the room, to invert the colors, to tint the image dyan or yellow.

I couldn't really make much of the film. It is short, but it's definitely something I had to endure. There are some vignettes involving people in the room, but they are soon dispensed with and we return to the chilly austerity of a single image, slowly getting larger.

According to the director, the film is supposed to be a summation of the director's nervous system, religion, and aesthetics. This seems willfully obscure to me, and less than the sum of its parts. Hilariously, the director released a 15-mite version called WVLNT (Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time)

The Black Balloon

Saw The Black Balloon, a film about a teeager growing up with his low-functioning autistic brother. His father is involved somehow in the Army, his mother is pregnant and he's a teenager who must now start pulling his weight. It's quickly established that he feels neglected by his parents, living in the shadow of his needy and obnoxious brother. The brother is portrayed as a sort of force of nature, a capricious source of chaos in their lives that is sometimes quietly playing video games, sometimes leaping about the house screaming. All of these things must just be endured but this is hard for a young man.

To complicate his life further, he's going to some rich-kids school where they're perpetually learning to become lifeguards. There he gets one of those impossibly perfect girlfriends that only exist in movies about learning to deal with life. She's played with charm but kind of only exists to be sweet and understanding.

There's a good scene with her where the protagonist is mortified by his brother's behavior only to have her shrug it off as no big deal. This is kind of the nut of the film. Most everyone understands about disabled relatives - there's no need to be embarrassed. And similarly, there's nothing to be gained by wishing that the situation were different. It is this way, so try to help out okay?

Since this is a feel-good movie, everything ultimately works out but it would have been interesting to see a failure state. Sometimes, surely, we can't handle what we are given. What then? There's some climactic conflict where the protagonist rages against the world for inflicting this burden on him, but he has a strong father, a patient mother, and an angelic girlfriend (and also a Super Nintendo that is clearly bootleg.)

Jigoku

Saw Jigoku, an early Japanese horror film (from the 60s). The protagonist is a personality-less college student who is friends with some seriously sinister dude who wears a lot of black and a lot of red and who I think is supposed to be the (or a) devil. So these two have a hit-and-run accident that throws them into a spiral of deaths, murders, and hidden crimes, escalating in the protagonist actually going to Hell.

The film is amazing. The protagonist is a bit weak, it's true, but horror protagonists are often merely faces to witness the crazy spectacle. And spectacular this film is. he ending third in hell, especially, is great. Jarring discordant jazz mixed with women screaming and jet engines fill the soundtrack, spot lighting makes the characters look like lost ghosts in an ocean of black. It's a bit tame by today's standards but it's worth a look.

I also liked the harsh, didactic world of the film, where all sins are punished and punished s cruel, bizarre ways. The melodramatic logic of the deaths is also nice, ticking along like a clock, each inevitably leading to the other. This isn't a scary movie so much a grotesque and imaginative one, but that's the type I like best anyway. Definitely worth a look!

Ten Canoes

Saw Ten Canoes, a film that's half ethnography, half myth. It opens with an Aboriginal man telling a story about a hunting party. In that party an old man tells a story to a young man about the old days. Since we are focussed here on the old times, the old days are shown in color, the present is in black and white. This indicates both the backward-looking nature of storytelling, and also the unconventionality of this film. There's not a clear moral, for example, and there's less action and more analysis. The omniscient narrator tells us of the characters' inner lives, of what was going on in their hearts or in their souls.

This is a slow film. Like a Tarrence Mellick film, it will either entrance or induce sleep. We get lots of gorgeous long takes of swampland and Aboriginal folks stripping trees and performing ceremonies. It's gorgeous to look at but, like I say, a little meditative and slow. Approach with coffee.

Since this a partial ethnography of the Aboriginals, there's a danger of mythologizing, of making something mystical and exotic when it's really just the same human feelings handled slightly differently. I am out of my lane here, but I feel that that's not happening too much here. The narrator sanguinely rebukes us for being impatient and for expecting the story to go another direction (very postmodern!) but there's little talk of spirits and magic (although there is some) and more talk of personalities and tribal law.

This is a nice little film. Unpretentious and kindly, it was too slow for me, but it was very pretty and very different. I liked it.

Kill!

Saw Kill!, another samurai movie. This is the first in a while that wasn't about bureaucrats being assassinated. No, this one was a dark comedy. It opens with a starving ronin arriving in ruined town. He's told by some remaining villagers that an old lady runs an eatery down the road so he runs over eagerly, only to find she's hung herself. Amazing. The comic mischief is not really great, stunted as it is by distance from my familiar culture (and by my general grumpiness when it comes to comedy) but the film hold together fairly well as a knotty heist-ish movie.

The main plot involves a group of samurai hiding out in a mountain safe-house (they had recently assassinated a bureaucrat. Seriously.) and being sieged by another group. The clan leaders and city officials scheme and double-cross the groups, setting them against each other and trying to keep the peace. Against all of this and muddying the waters are a farmer ronin who wants to become a samurai and an ex-samurai turned beggar. There's a lot of plates spinning.

Comedies often keep many plates spinning to prevent any one comic storyline from becoming stale and samurai movies seem to tend towards very intricate plots. This film contains a double-whammy of plotlines and it's to the film's credit that wasn't harder to follow them all. But it was fairly hard to follow them all, alas, and I think I didn't get everything that happened.

Not one of my favorites - I got kind of lost in all of the plots and silliness. That silliness by the way is often dark - people getting hilariously killed at just the right moment. It's exaggerated enough that it was more funny than tragic however. The rest of the film is the usual sort of mafia film - lots of double-crosses and sudden twists.

Like the other samurai movies however, there's a deep distrust of petty tyrants. Authority is respected at high enough levels, but the local magistrates and ombudsmen are not to be trusted. These films come from the 60s. I wonder if this had anything to do with relaxing social standards, or with the recent defeat in WW2? It's all a rich tapestry I suppose.

Triumph of the Will

Saw Triumph of the Will, the Nazi propaganda film. It was #347 on a list of the top 1000 movies as aggregated across many critics, so this was bound to happen eventually. Let's get this over with.

The film is basically a documentary. It has no plot at all. It's essentially a 114 minute long military parade with a few speeches sprinkled throughout. It opens with an fly-over of some German city, with its high buildings and soldiers stretching off into the horizon. We see ancient grand buildings and flags of germany and of the Nazi party. This attempts the tricky association of the brand new and exciting Nazi party with the traditional glory of Germany. This bridge between the excitement of the new and the familiarity of the old is a running theme in the speeches and imagery.

Much can be gleaned from the state of the world at the time by listening to the speeches. They talk of mandatory work assignments and of weeding out the "weakness" of the country. Sure enough, the concentration camps had already been accepting prisoners for about a year prior to this film being made. We see the Hitler Youth being fed heaping plates of sausage and potatoes and hearty soups and we may conclude that they weren't out of their recession just yet. Indeed three square meals, the film seems to imply, are just a party registration away. There's also some weird business with farmers whirling their shovels around like guns, chanting about the soil and such. I guess there was kind of a militarization of agriculture (in addition perhaps to the militarization of all levels of society.)

They talk a lot in contradictory terms. As I said, they try to portray the Nazi party as both a new thing and as an extension of old things. They talk about how all people will be equal but also that they will remove the weak and corrupt elements of society. They talk about how they were a minority party at first, but only because they wanted it that way. This is an intentional effort to allow the crowd to hear what it wants and to avoid baldly stating their true ideology. Even the choice of a female director (Leni Riefenstahl) for this film was designed to indicate to the world that women were equal in this new German utopia (although of course these women must also return to their traditional roles for the sake of their own health and happiness. Of course.)

Credit where it's due: the rallies and parades are very grand and impressive. They fall a tad flat on screen but must have truly been something to see in person. At one point they have a trio of 100-foot-tall flags. Neat! Appart from the set design however, the film is sort of dull. It prominently features people that I know nothing about (Herr Todt anyone? Herr Lutze?) and endless self-congratulation and chest-puffery about how awesome the party is. I find that sort of thing fairly dull even when I'm on board with the message being delivered. Apart from that, there's a ton of shots of cute children, quaint old folks, and handsome soldiers - which was kind of nice. I kept myself awake by trying to read between the lines of their speeches. At one point Adolf himself says something to the effect of "we're all here because we want to be here! Other nations will only understand this as a government order, but we know better!" That was definitely the biggest laugh line in the film for me.

Marwencol

Saw Marwencol, a documentary about outsider artist Mark Hogancamp who was beaten by five men so severely that his face resembled a newborn child's. This beating caused a coma, amnesia, and brain damage. Like a newborn, he was dumped into a new life. He had to learn to walk, talk, read, and write all over again. Because he had the misfortune to be both American and poor, he had little physical or mental therapy to help him recover and had to make do with his mother and friends. So, in order to deal with his trauma, he created an amature form of therapy where he creates and photographs super-realistic dioramas of Marwencol, a fictional peaceful town in Belgium in the midst of WW2. In Marwencol there is a G.I. Joe doll representing him and various other people in his life, along with a bunch of Barbies representing his female friends. He uses these dolls to play out elaborate storylines.

Mark's town of Marwencol is a decidedly adult but very friendly place. The storylines have a sitcom-ish feel. A bar seems to be a Cheers stand-in, but there's also a magical witch with a time machine and most of the women are in love with Mark's character (natch.) It has a very playful, amateurish feel. Then again however, there are also SS officers perpetually hunting for the village who sometimes beat his alter-ego doll senseless, re-playing the attack that put him in a coma. Other times they murder the women, or angrily demand alcohol. We know that before the attack Mark had been an alcoholic, so the SS officers are playing out not only his attackers but also Mark himself. It's fascinating.

The documentary follows Mark in his life, giving us little insights like this and drawing connections that Mark never explains but never really makes any effort to hide either. Mark opens himself up completely to the camera and talks happily about anything the director wants. He seems like a completely sweet, genuine guy who is earnestly trying to cure himself. This is a kindly sort of film that feels non-exploitative, that interviews a man with frank mental problems but does not leer or skewer. It just lets us get to know Mark and his work.

Goyokin

Saw Goyokin, another samurai movie. The previous buch that I've seen were all directed by the same guy (Eiichi Kudo) whereas this one was directed by Hideo Gosha, so it feels much different. It's more evocative, less about the heist and more about the characters, haunted as they are by their past. It opens on a woman returning to her village to find evidence of a struggle and that everyone has vanished. Crows are everywhere. It feels like a horror movie. It's very effective and interesting.

As the plot continues, we meet our grim-faced samurai hero and we meet up again with the woman from the opening sequence. There's a heist (of course) but this time our rag-tag team of heroes is trying to prevent the heist. This is an interesting inversion from the previous films where the heroes are usually overthrowing tyrannical rulers. This time they're upholding their honor and therefore the law. There's a scene near the end where one of the characters points out that the law they're upholding only really benefits the rich and powerful, throwing an interesting double-negative into the film. I'll have to keep an eye on the relationship between these lone-wolf samurais and their relationship towards authority. In America, authority is always suspicious and burdensome. In Japan, I suspect, that's not the case.

Anyway, the film is interesting. It is, after all, a samurai movie, so we get the endless sword fights and slow, dainty, cat-like posturing. And of course there's a scene where a big gang of guys runs at the hero, only to be cut down one by one. There's the standard boilerplate, but there's also glimmers of a more mysterious, more emotional film sublimated underneath. Not one of my favorites but worth a look, I suppose.

Providence

Saw Providence, a clever film that opens on a court scene where a soldier is being interrogated for shooting down a werewolf. The scene is being narrated by an old man, as though he too is watching the same film we are. It soon becomes clear however that this man narrating the film is an author, dying and drunk in bed, writing one last story. This story is what we are seeing. The characters slosh about, one becoming the mother of another, a bit-character incongruously showing up where they didn't belong, as the author loses track of the plot and begins to slip into his own reminiscences. A high-concept premise which is more-or-less given justice by the film. Good show.

The film was made in the 70s and has the same man-raging-against-society themes that were so hot back then. If I were in a less charitable mood, I'd probably be annoyed at the author's self-described assholishness. As is however, he is very visibly and obviously dying, so his strange raging at/celebration of his past life makes more sense. Not everything in the novel universe is explained or even tied up in any meaningful way, but we end on a high note which is nice.

This was a clever, fun film that I liked. It has some weak spots but seeing real life poke obtrusively into the story was fun, and extrapolating what this meant was fun too.

The Five Obstructions

Saw The Five Obstructions, an outrageously clever documentary that follows a series of five challenges that noted sadist Lars Von Trier gives to his friend, Jørgen Leth. Jørgen has created a short art-house film called The Perfect Human. Here it is:


Von Trier's challenges are designed to deconstruct this chilly little short. No more serious long takes - all edits must be 12 frames long. No actors, Jørgen himself must play the perfect human. No more abstraction, the film must show human suffering and need. It becomes a sort of game between Jørgen and Lars. Lars tries to find the one thing that Jørgen is using to express himself, Jørgen attempting to avoid compromising his integrity and vision.

Lars characterizes this as "therapy" to help Jørgen grow artistically, however Lars Von Trier is a cruel sort of man, and their relationship is quickly compared to Faust and Mephistopheles. Lars capriciously changes the rules and punishes Jørgen for slight transgressions, but always in an oh-so-clever, artistic way. At one point, Jørgen does not follow one of Lars' instructions so Lars, like a sulking child, says the next obstruction is no obstruction at all. Jørgen must remake the short film. Now Jørgen is forced to produce something derivative and compromised, but no: he re-imagines the short as a film noir. Brilliant!

This is a film where it probably helps to have seen a few Von Trier films and probably some of Jørgen Leth's work (I haven't however) to get a feel for the people involved. This is not a film for everyone, concerned as it is with the role of the director as both artist and subject of their own work, voyeuristic and yet also exposed. Like the caviar they eat after each successful obstruction, it has a strong flavor and an acquired taste. It is fascinating in all kinds of ways however, if only as commentary on the artistic process. The ending is absolutely perfect and reveals Von Trier's motivation for this exercise.

Not a delightful film, but a chilly, intellectual, fascinating one. I really enjoyed it.

Cloud Atlas

Saw Cloud Atlas, an ambitious and pretentious film about a bunch of intertwining stories, stretching through the past and the future. The same characters play many parts and talk about an existentialist sort of afterlife, using film and literature to evoke a life after death, a legacy of goodwill and noble deeds forever rebelling against oppressive governments, brutal tribesmen, and overbearing nurses. Alas, because the same characters play many parts, this requires the use of some sometimes truly god-awful makeup to change the gender and race of the actors. It's very jarring, for example, to suddenly recognize Tom Hanks's face on some asian doctor's body. For some actors this works well, but Tom Hanks especially sticks out like a sore thumb. Frustrating.

The film keeps cutting between the different stories in a sort of collage, weaving one revelation with a setback in another story. This keeps things breathless and interesting but the film is 3 hours long and it wears after a while. This is intentionally used to drive the simultaneous climaxes of the different stories together into a hysterical crescendo, with the string section going crazy, men screaming in anguish and in slow motion, and women sweeping away in arch triumph all at once.

I really liked this movie. It's very much a mess and has deep flaws which contemporary reviews pointed out with hooting delight, but it's heart is in the right place and I'd rather see a fascinating mess than a smug masterpiece any day. It feels like a poor man's version of a lot of different films (Synecdoche New York and Tree of Life spring to mind.) It's very beautifully shot and told but also expects you to accept with total seriousness Halle Berry saying "you have to do whatever you can't not do". It feels most like Zardoz to me: definitely onto something interesting, extremely self-serious, and deeply silly at parts. Without an enduring box-office hook as good as Sean Connery in a red bikini, I think this one will eventually fall out of memory. Which is sort of a pity.

The Great Killing

Saw The Great Killing, another samurai movie. This one follows a group of samurai who are conspiring to kill the next in line for the shogunate. They're planning on ambushing him and killing him which seems to be the only way anything got done in old timey Japan. The film opens with most of the conspirators being captured and tortured in horrible and graphic ways. This film predates some of the other samurai movies I've seen lately but it feels the most modern so far. It feels like a gangster movie, juxtaposing dry discussions of politics with frank violence. The fights in this film are shot on drunken-feeling handheld cameras, swooning around the action and intercutting jarring close-ups of grimacing faces or jerking bodies. The technique is very interesting, very visceral.

So, the samurais left over after the opening raid continue to plan the assassination, but each is haunted by the sacrifices they've made (and make throughout the film.) These are not the usual stoic badasses but quaking, haunted men, one of them explicitly insane with religious zeal. This surely does not feel like the usual, entirely justified insurrection of other films. The characters are motivated only by off-screen narration flatly telling us that the shogun is cruel. The ethics feel muddy here. The film finally crystallizes into a climactic street-brawl/sword-fight and things feel more comfortable then, but even there there's surprises and changes in expectation.

So, very modern and ambiguous feeling. Darker than I'm used to, which is sort of nice. I had a hard time following the politics of the film so I probably missed many important themes. Such is life. An interesting upset of the samurai genre.

Satantango

Saw Satantango, Bela Tarr's seven-and-a-half-hour long film. Yes, folks. I did it! I'm not sure that this feat, which requires me only to stay conscious and pointed inthe right direction, counts as an accomplishment, but it feels that way. This film is both very good and very slow.

It follows the dozen or so inhabitants of a small Hungarian village. We follow each in turn, their paths crossing, forking and joining. Several scenes are shown twice from different perspectives. The film is very dour and kind of pessimistic. It has a fairly wholesome theme of the ties that bind us together, but these ties are depicted as ugly, scrabbling. Spiders and spiderwebs are a recurrent image, poetically we leave for intermission while a trio of spiders are spinning webs. The connections of these villagers are via crime, adultery, shared guilt more than shared humanity. The film is comic at parts as well however and is described as a black comedy.

I saw it as a fairly straight tragedy but with richly observed scenes. The opening scene of cows plodding across the town square is often cited as a seductive, mesmerizing sequence but my favorite was the introduction of the village doctor. He sits by his window, obsessively noting down the movements of the villagers, pausing only to refill a flask of brandy and to reveal that he is deeply drunk. He's a fat, disgusting slob and I loved watching him wheeze and belch and stumble. Horrible and entrancing!

The film opens with a mysterious church-bell ringing. There is no church nearby so where are the bells coming from? The film suggests first that it is all of the echos of bells from neighboring villages, all ringing at the same time, joining together to make a distant bell noise just at this village. It then reveals that a retarded man is banging on an iron poll on the outskirts of town. This is a nice nucleus for the film. We are together, but only because of our shared ugliness. But we are together. But we are ugly. But we are together.

The characters often listen for quiet noises, try to identify subtle smells, peer into the darkness for an approaching figure. They are often hunting and looking for something. The only character to find this sense of connection and to find a pattern in all of this does so at the end of their life. Again, the film seems to both celebrate our quest for shared meaning and experience and also to mock the futility of this effort. If only the most primitive, animal things connect us, are those connections worth having?

The film's full of lingering shots. Everything is shown. When a man walks down a road, we watch him go until he's a dot on the horizon. A party breaks out and we follow it from reluctant start to passing-out finish. The effect is to make things feel very clinical, very expository. This is the whole of the village, I felt, even the boring parts. I'm not sure it justifies 450 minutes, but perhaps this is the price we must pay for this feeling.

Role Models

Saw Role Models, an amiable and bro-y comedy about two guys whose full-time job is apparently to drive around and shill crypto-Red Bull to highschool students. It's not really clear how this is a sustainable and actual job, but this is what the film is telling us. One of the guys is very unhappy with his life, the other is stupid and amiable and oversexed and content. After the angry one loses his girlfriend and his job all in one angry day, they wind up either having to go to jail or to mentor children. Because this is an amiable comedy, they mentor kids.

This isn't a great film, but it's not bad. Things kind of just work out in a satisfying but unearned way. The kids they mentor (a nerd and a very young, angry kid) flip from stealing their cars and screaming that they're being kidnapped to being best buds in the span of about two days. Much is made of what Problem Children they are but after that magic switch is flipped, they seem completely chill. And anyway I was kind of creeped out at the oversexed guy bonding with his mentee over how great boobs are. I always find it a little alienating when straight men bond with boys over their mutual attraction to women. I have never in my life been congratulated by a mentor-type-figure for being attracted to guys. The whole thing just seems weird and alien to me. Eh.

But like I say, this is a friendly film. It's not very believable but it's hopeful and winning, and I'll take that over indie-movie misery-porn any day. No, grand romantic gestures don't work and people don't act like they can hear the background music, but it's fun to pretend for a while anyway.

Dante 01

Saw Dante 01, a film by Marc Caro, longtime collaborator with Jean Pierre Jeunet. Caro apparently is much less whimsical, more morbid and ominous. This film is set in a prison in deep space in some far-off future where everything and everyone is given a symbolically significant name. The prisoners have names like "Moloch", "Lazare", the wardens have names like "Charon" and "Persephone", the prison itself is shaped like a cross. Into this world come a mysterious man who can raise people from the dead and who sees the world like it's an Alex Grey painting. Along with this man comes a scientist who is tying to change the prisoners' behavior by injecting them with nanobots that just happen to resemble the prison ship itself (sheer coincidence, no doubt.)

It's very stylish and grim and evocative but I can't really decypher it. There's the obvious Christ imagery associated with the new prisoner, and a sense of oppressive control, with the prison-shaped nanobots. There's a heavy dose of weird-ass nonsense however which makes it all feel kind of arbitrary. We're dealing with big ideas in a kind of clumsy, oblique way. I'm being kind of hard but I was disappointed that the film doesn't go anywhere with its symbolism, seemingly content just to be a spectacle.

That said, a spectacle it certainly is. I had a fairly grainy copy of the film to watch but even in this diminished state the ending climax is a sight to behold. The film is full of flashy, music-video-style visuals. The symbolism involved in the names and imagery fails to gell, I feel, but the film is still a fairly wild trip. Good times!

Eleven Samurai

Finally saw Eleven Samurai, another ensemble assassination film. It reminded me strongly of Thirteen Assassins (which predates this film by 4 years) - similarly to that one, this film is mostly about frustration. The villain is tantalizingly close, but the conditions are not right and the attack must be delayed yet again. This film gets more into some political machinations, motivating the protagonists not only with revenge but also by threatening destruction of their clan. Okay.

This film was okay, but it was basically Thirteen Assassins all over again, even down to a scene where they point out the ambush spot on a map and the camera zooms in all dramatically. The acting is very over-the-top, with dudes growling and grimacing directly into each other's faces. Like I say, this one gets more into the periphery of the story, delving into the political climate and the ringleader's romantic life. I'm not sure this adds anything beyond yet more motivation for the grand attack.

The grand attack, when it comes, is pretty and pretty satisfying. A big rainstorm affords some nice mist to cover the screen, exactly like the filmmaker drawing a veil over the rest of the film. Very clever bits. I didn't enjoy this very much, but it's done with now, which is good.

Don't Look Back

Saw Don't Look Back, a behind-the-scenes film which follows Bob Dylan on a British concert tour. Shot on sincere and intimate grainy black and white, it takes place mostly in boozy 3 am hotel rooms and in tight phone booths, cribbing from BBC reporters. The film opens with us overhearing interviewers asking Bob where he came from, what makes him sing? We hear one reporter tut into a phone that Bob's young audience probably doesn't understand the full meaning of his words. These are sort of running themes in the conversations captured in the film.

The most interesting bits of the film for me were the verbal sparring sessions Bob would have with reporters. Reporters would riddle him about his stance on religion or politics and although Bob does respond candidly to Times magazine, he would more often retreat into complicated word games. His favorite trick is to ask them to define every word. "Do you care very much about people?" "Well we mean different things by those words 'people', 'care'. What are people? What does it mean to care?" This is a good trick because either he'll get away with answering a very simple question ("there are people I care about") or the reporter will have to spend tons of time defining common words (and the words used in these definitions of course must be defined.) One poor young dude falls into this second trap. Bob successfully turns the interview around and quizzes the reporter on what a 'friend' is, on what he feels he's contributing to the world. It feels cruel, but Bob's smiling down at him as they talk. I get the sense that this is really interesting and valuable to him.

There's also screaming fans and nice, echoing, maze-like backstages. There's some weird business with the actual Sheriff of Nottingham's wife, and Bob losing his cool over someone throwing a glass off a balcony (which, to be fair, is a dick move,) and endless pot-shots at Donovan. Interesting little film about a guy I know little about. A bit too intimate and quiet for me, but an interesting little trip.

The Jerk

Saw The Jerk. I think it may be the first Steve Martin movie that I've really, genuinely enjoyed. Most of the time his humor is a tad too dry for me. I'm never sure if he's serious or just being folksy or being ironically folksy or what but this one was good. It follows a very stupid man having very stupid adventures. He dates a motorcycle-riding woman, sings songs on the beach, and goes travelling with his dog. There's much delightfully silly business.

There's some racial stuff ("I was born a poor black boy...") that's not offensive (as far as I can tell anyway) but is certainly weird enough that I think that no one would touch it in this modern time. It's a fun film tho. There's not a whole lot going on appart from silly fun. I enjoyed it.

Oblivion

Saw Oblivion, a sci-film from the early 2010s, a time rich with good, high-concept sci fi. This one has Tom Cruise in some kind of glass-and-white-plastic Apple™-inspired future where aliens have landed on Earth and are running rampant. Tom and lady friend have to protect the water-vacuums that are sucking up the oceans before they finally evacuate to one of Saturn's moons. Sounds nice, huh?

Tom makes an offhand comment early in the film about his "mandatory memory wipe" which implies some seriously heavy-handed control over his life. It also evokes the title, Oblivion, which means not only missing but forgotten. Also, when we see the aliens, they're well-obscured, decorated in feathers, and move suspiciously similarly to how a stuntman might shamble about. So, it is immediately apparent that things are not what they seem.

Later in the film the nature of experiences and identity gets played with, and we're treated to some nice visuals and some impressively threatening computer-noises. The drones (which are friendly) make dubstep-esque grows and shriek like pigs when they fly. They're great! Unfortunately the film sort of crystallizes into an action film once the showdown with the aliens starts for real. There's readings from Roman plays glorifying the noble death in the heat of battle and other such nonsense. There's that identity stuff I mentioned earlier that works to motivate the character into caring about dying well, but I feel it's not very well explored.

I'm kind of grasping at gripes here though. There's a few boring action sequences but the rest of the film is pretty to look at and fun to think about. Nicely done!

13 Assassins (1963)

Saw the 1963 version of 13 Assassins. It followed this band of 13 samurais who are supposed to kill this guy who is the son of one shogun and is the brother of another. He's untouchable but an utterly evil man. This was basically a heist movie. After establishing the rightness of their cause, we get a rallying-the-troops sequence, the stake-out, and the final, glorious, clockwork climax. It's a riot.

The film was shot in black and white but the film-quality is really good. I suspect they went black and white because this is a period piece or perhaps because it's a "serious" film but it has that smeary film quality that makes it look like television.

This film feels very a-typical of samurai films. The plot revolves around the justified killing of a nobleman. What is this, France? Also of note is that there's many hard deaths in this film. Normally in a samurai flick people die by theatrically stiffening up and falling over, quickly disappearing so that they can lie still until the shot is over. This movie has quite a few protracted deaths, with full on grimacing and stumbling and even one pointless death that happens in a cramped alleyway. The attacker in that case is frenzied and horrible. Very unlike the cool, extended-sword poses of other films.

I liked this movie. It's basically a heist but the heist formula works. There's always something to follow and be curious about, always some little personal tension to keep track of (although, with 13 main characters, some get completely lost in the shuffle.) A solid film.

Casque d'Or

Saw Casque d'Or, the film which apparently started the whole French New Wave. It's a sort of romantic crime story. A prostitute is the girlfriend of a gang member. At a tavern she falls in love with a random carpenter who has also been a jail-bird once. When the carpenter was in jail he befriended this thin dude who is also in the gang. The prostitute is also the favored girl of the head of the gang. These are the central conflicts: the prostitute and the carpenter are in love, the gang-leader wants her, a third man has her, and the carpenter has strong, bromantic ties to his jail-friend who (remember!) is also in the gang.

The film follows the seemingly doomed romance between the prostitute and the carpenter. They love each other but, since this is a crime film, honor and duty hang heavy and debts must be repaid. It seems fairly morbid and dismal to me, but then again I'm fairly dishonorable myself. I think I would probably die if I were in a gang one way or the other.

This aside, the film is beautifully shot and terribly, logically, dramatic. You can see why people would be inspired by the film and why it might re-ignite interest in noirs and crime dramas and interesting shots and such. The story is knotty and plausible, the main characters are all somewhat corrupt (although, of course, we root for them anyway.) It's an interesting film which unfortunately contains a lot of very familiar elements. It's noteworthy for having kick-started an artistic movement and a good film in its own merits but not especially interesting to me. Not bad, just not good enough.

Risky Business

Saw Risky Business, the film that I guess house-party films have been trying to copy ever since. It starts off very much like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, with a fabulously wealthy kid deciding, fuck it all, he was going to do what he wanted for a change. This is a fairly frustrating premise because it's portrayed as being very brave and liberating and more-human-than-thou and like yeah sure whatever but if I work for minimum wage what use is this example to me? The film Ordinary People dealt with the struggles of a rich family, but they were dealing with the death of their son and deaths happen to all families. Deciding to have the awesome bravery to say "fuck it" is not something I need to know how to handle (unless I've missed the point (which I feel I often do.))

That aside, the fim soon turns however when, in a fit of pre-internet-era horniness, the protagonist decides to call up a prostitute who steals his stuff and refuses to leave his parents' house. His parents are out of town, but they're returning in a few days and the protagonist's panic mounts. This gave me, the bored and decadent film-hound, a bit of schadenfreude for a while but the film is actually fundamentally on the rich kid's side so soon things start looking up (and thank goodness this film is taking the side of the rich kid because who else looking after the trust-fund babies in this cruel, harsh world?)

Despite the tricky premise, the film definitely has its moments. The much-parodied dancing-in-underwear scene is great and there's a train scene at the end which is really nice. The smirking ending feels like a lot of fun, even if it is a rich kid making good, and the moment where (of course) his parents fail to notice anything awry in the house is so good that shitty films have been copying it ever since (I'm thinking particularly of Project X here. I hated that movie so much.) I have to admit I didn't really like this movie, but I feel it wasn't really for me.

The Croods

Saw The Croods, a fairly goofy animated Dreamworks film about cave-folks who abandon their cave for silly and lushly animated adventures. The central conflict is between the father of the family who wants everyone to stay safe in a boring cave vs his daughter who wants them to explore and adventure. This conflict is thrown into high gear when the daughter meets this guy (named Guy) who is a clever, pretty dude who is full of non-cave-related survival technology.

The new Guy quickly usurps the father's position as head of the pack and everyone eagerly follows this new kid who is full of new technology, youth, and a promise of a better tomorrow. Much of the film follows the father slowly losing control of his family to this new guy. This is a kid's film, so it's not exactly a psychodrama. The family's embracing of the new guy is portrayed by the father sulking while everyone enjoys cave-mimosas, and the father being uncomfortable about this new guy standing so close to his daughter. Clearly, somewhere along the line someone said "what if the caveman father was, like, really conservative-minded? Like a caveman in the modern sense of the word?" and the writing team just ran with it.

The film is slightly cringy as a result of this. The father is just so at sea outside of his safe-zone and the new guy is just sooo competent and sooo pretty. The cards are very stacked against the father and indeed it's only when the father "changes" to become more like the new guy that he is redeemed. The father's fear-based approach to survival has its merits however. We learn in the voice-over prologue that they've out-lived many other families. I feel if this film were made today, in these more partisan times, the father might have better narrative legs to stand on.

Anyway, the film is a typical kid's film. Queasily sincere at times, but tons of lush animation, Sunday cartoon-ready characters, and a world that wants to dazzle you. The ending is earned and sincere and lovely. The characters are fun but I just couldn't shake the feeling that the cave-dad was going to just beat the pretty, smart, new guy to death with a stone at some point.

Samurai Gold Seekers

Saw Samurai Gold Seekers (AKA Sword of the Beast) a samurai movie about a dude on the run from his clan who are after him for killing their head clan-guy. We follow this dude and he's clearly the protagonist but most of the film concerns an illegal gold mining operation in the mountains. This is government land and thus it's illegal to mine there but a husband-wife team are mining away. There's a gang of thieves who are trying to steal this gold, the main dude who is in cahoots with an ugly man to steal the gold, and another husband-wife team from the clan who are hunting down the main dude. There's a lot going on.

The different groups are tied together with a theme of betrayal (especially of superiors over subordinates.) The protagonist is shaggy-haired and talks of the mountains as being the domain of "beasts" however the film argues that humans have beast-hood thrust upon them. Everyone is taking part in the bestial pursuit of gold, but everyone is compelled to do so by superiors or for nobel reasons (well, except for the gang of thieves. They're just evil.)

In keeping with the beastial/human dichotomy, much of the film is fairly lurid. Many rapes occur, murder is of course perpetrated at the drop of a hat, and double-crosses are common. Despite being made in the 60s, it has the feel of true-crime film, luxuriating in the ugliness of human activity.

This is a film with a straightforward message hidden behind a complex plot. It's very tough to follow at times but always reliably returns to a human caught between the nobility of their soul and the bestial compulsions of their superiors.