She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

Saw She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), a western directed by John Ford.  I don't like John Ford's films, although they garner a lot of critical acclaim.  It makes it hard to review his films because I dimly suspect a lot of my criticism comes from prejudice or nitpicking.  In my defense, Ford does his part to make this difficult for me by dealing often with unfortunate and badly aged subjects and heroes.

This film follows a cavalry troupe lead by an aging John Wayne, only five days from retirement.  They are in a tricky situation because the Indians have been emboldened by the recent death of General Custer and are on the war path.  Wayne must remove the women-folks from the camp which women folk consist of the Major's wife, a tough lady who has been in the army some time, and their niece who is a pretty woman, first introduced demanding to be allowed to picnic with her beaux, a trust-find kid, only to be stopped by her other beaux, an incredibly rule-bound smart boy who is some kind of army robot and an ex-confederate soldier.

So, we're dealing with a lot here.  Modern perception of the Indian Wars has changed dramatically since the 40s when this film was made.  Ditto the civil war which, as of the 40s, was still being told to us by the letters of Robert E Lee, and which still had the veneer of being about something besides slavery.  So, our heroes are fighters for colonialism and slavery.  How charming.  I want to see the good in this film, but the bad is right there.  It's like watching the Jazz Singer casually applying blackface.

Ditto also this picnicking woman.  She's portrayed as a classy, possibly fussy lady who is assailed and accused of adventuring and of not taking the toll of war seriously.  But ... she's accused of this in dialogue by one of her boyfriends.  There's no indication that that's what's going on in reality, outside of that guy's head.  Unless I missed it.  Did I miss it?  She's the girl everyone loves and she has some strange daddy-fixation on Wayne's character.

Let me just talk about what's good for a moment: the visuals are stunning.  The film takes place in Utah's monument valley and it's gorgeous and breathtaking.  This scenery is goosed considerably by mists and thunderstorms and fires and elaborate lighting.  At one point John Wayne visits his family's grave (not a spoiler, this is establishing back story) and the picnicking lady shows up.  She's standing in front of the subset and half of the image is red and the other half is black and it's stunning and I loved it.  The final scenes are (of course) of someone riding off into the sunset and boy howdy does that sunset weep with color.  The film is unequivocally beautiful.

The plot becomes more sentimental as it plays out, which is typical of Ford.  He makes lovely films with troubling elements that stick in my grim, sour craw, and this is no exception.  I didn't like it, but I dimly feel I missed the point and I also know that this film was straight-up not meant for me, so it is what it is.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Saw Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, a blood-n-booze-fueled 70s western which starts off with a godfather-style man torturing his daughter (in some off-screen way) to reveal the name of the father of her child.  When she finally cries out "Alfredo Garcia" he offers his various goons one million dollars for the head of Alfredo Garcia.  Two of these goons travel around Mexico showing a picture of Alfredo to various people and asking after him and finally they run into a small bar pianist who knows him.  This small time pianist is the real main character of the film and the place where the film starts building character and so forth.

The film drops one big hint early on - the picture of Alfredo very closely resembles the pianist to the point that I thought he was Alfredo.  According to imdb trivia, the actor who played the pianist is actually in the picture, just with prosthetics.  As the pianist decides to chase after Alfredo, it is not just Alfredo's life he's going to deliver to the goons, but his own.  This theme is reinforced by his corvette car being increasingly beat up as the film goes on and progressively more coated with dust and also by his white suit becoming smattered with blood and dirt.

This is a fairly grim film.  The pianist constantly swills alcohol and speaks to Alfredo as if he were in the car - hating him for putting him through this but also reminiscing on their friendship and liking him.  As we can tell from the business with the picture, Alfredo is just another version of him.  This is not personal, it's just business.  He is a man who is confronting the cruelties of a capricious world (or in this case, the godfather-type guy from the beginning.)  He wants this one million dollars because it means a new life, but is he willing to sacrifice his entire current life for that chance?

The film is fairly grim and although I liked the themes and subtexts of the film, I didn't really like it.  It ends on a close-up of an endlessly firing machinegun muzzle.  This intense focusing on (glorification of?) violence is off-putting and after two hours, frankly enough.  It's not a bad film by any means, just very ugly and grim and in love with its ugly grimness.  A good blood-n-guts film, but as usual, I'm a bit too nelly to really dig it.

Song of the Sea (2014)

Saw Song of the Sea, a beautifully animated film by studio Cartoon Saloon who also produced The Secret of Kells.  With the Kells movie, it was similarly gorgeous but I felt it was a little too incoherent - it wasn't clear to me what the production of the book would accomplish or how it would help stop the barbarian hordes.  All that is fixed with Song of the Sea which is perfectly supplied with mirrored characters, a clear theme of loss and the pain of healing, together with wonderful and eerie Irish magical creatures.

The film follows a lighthouse keeper who lives with his son and pregnant wife on a tiny island.  The wife has complications during child birth and produces a mute little girl who the son hates as a symbol of his missing, beloved mother and whose father over-protects, as a symbol of the last piece of his wife he has left.  I don't think it's a spoiler exactly, but after about fifteen minutes of film it becomes clear the mother is a selkie - this sets up the sea and water in general as a powerful symbol of loss and of uncontrolled emotion.

Indeed, control over emotion becomes the central struggle of the film.  The antagonist is revealed to be literally bottling up negative (and positive) emotions to spare everyone the trouble of fully experiencing a painful world.  The scene with the antagonist is also the most compelling both in terms of animation and story.  I was reminded of the various showdowns with Yubaba in Spirited Away in the mixture of grotesque and threatening animation on display.

This film is really good - it looks good, it's funny, it's creepy, it tells a good story, it doesn't even shy away from real emotions - all the good things!  I loved it!

Inside (2021)

Saw Inside (2021), a comedy special from Al Yankovic heir apparent Bo Burnham.  He tackles the isolation and creeping agoraphobia experienced by many of us through the pandemic.  It kicks off undermining the comedy a bit by neurotically asking if we should really even be joking at a time like this, when so much is wrong with the world.  He continues to break the fourth wall throughout the show, including footage of himself setting up shots and rehearsing songs.  It's not altogether funny, but it is interesting to watch.

Bo starts off very conventionally, poking fun at white women's Instagram pages, his own need for attention, and apologizing for being problematic.  We fairly quickly shift gears however into recursive analysis of his own self-analysis in a brilliant reaction-shot sketch. This preemptive self-critique, he explains directly to the camera, is a pointless defense mechanism to stave off external critique (from people like me!)  Several times he zooms the camera into a mirror, letting us see the camera's eye which is always hungrily watching him, often as he looks on haggard, or cries.

The quarantine and lockdowns are hard for all of us, but I imagine doubly so for a performer.  They must perform to an unblinking, un-reacting camera in an empty room.  Bo claims that he used to have panic attacks when performing on stage, and here comes a convenient pandemic to keep him locked inside, not growing but not vulnerable either - a stunted, overgrown hermit crab in his shell, just slowly falling apart from loneliness, the need for approval and attention, and the overwhelming information feed the is the internet.

The show is not that funny but, as Bo points out, it's kind of hard to be both sincere and funny right now.  It reminded me a lot of Tarnation in that it seemed underproduced, sincere, and was kind of harrowing.  The act of filming and sharing this footage taints its honesty though - this is a performance to some extent.

The Sacrifice

Saw The Sacrifice, a film by Tarkovsky.  It's a slow film, full of meditative, minutes-long takes the seems to deal mostly with the nature of faith and sacrifice.  The plot follows a retired actor (or philosopher or something) who lives in a pleasant but small cottage with his wife and some small boy who I think is their grandson.  It is the man's birthday and he at the birthday dinner party, they get news that world war 3 (or some similar calamity) has broken out.  He drunkenly promises god that he will sacrifice everything if he can make things go back to normal.  The son-in-law, a doctor, has a handgun in his doctor's bag.

The film opens with the protagonist telling the young boy about a monk who watered a dead tree for years until it miraculously blossomed.  He professes a belief in the power of ritual and claims that if you repeat an action enough times, something must change.  "It has to."  This sets up the central interest of the film: the irrationality of belief and the equally irrational expectation that it be rewarded in some way.  The film intelligently favors realism and shows that this irrational belief is not purely a good thing, but has real costs to the believer and their loved ones.

Not only religious faith is examined however.  The protagonist explains to the ever-present boy that he has sacrificed his life for the sake of art and philosophy.  He has not truly lived, but merely prepared himself for a life of reflection which is both monastic and worldly.  He is a paralyzed academic, knowing all and doing nothing.  In the intellectual tradition, this is a valuable and admirable life, but it too costs him something.

These dual kinds of faith and sacrifice are subtly referenced and contrasted many times in the film.  The actor complains that much of society is full of this sort of destruction, usually as a result of the fear of death.  He denounces all of civilization as founded on vanity and sin, which he defines to be decadence and unnecessary things.  His house and the rooms inside are extremely spare to the point of looking like sound stages and he's always listening to restrained, subtle Japanese flute music.  This is a very advanced form of taste and culture and affectation and vanity.

The film is very Tarkovsky-ish, filled with slow shots of strange things and with (maybe?) dream sequences involving broken furniture and dripping water.  It's full of ambivalence and intriguing details which don't seem to go anywhere.  The protagonist receives an outdated map of Europe as a present, for example, and their postman seems to fake a heart attack for some reason.  There's a scene where the protagonist's wife must be sedated and as she struggles her dress hitches up, exposing her beautiful legs.

It's a slow and meditative film.  It's not super gripping, however the mystery of what will be sacrificed and how kept me awake.  It's the sort of film that's perfect for a film class: full of intriguing ideas and symbols and themes, ripe for discussion and argument.

Faust (1926)

Saw Faust (1926), directed by F W Murnau.  It was spectacular and bold and unfortunately exhausted my short attention span fairly early.  It follows the famous Faust who sells his soul to semi-demon Mephisto in exchange for knowledge and power.  Mephisto torments him on earth by giving him his every desire, usually an excess of what he wanted or in some way that screws him, monkey-pawing him in some diabolical way to spoil Faust's happiness.

The film has two main acts: everything leading up to the signing of the contract, and then the aftermath.  Up to the contract signing, everything is just eye-popping.  We open on an angel and Mephisto fighting in heaven.  There's a scene where Mephisto appears in the sky above a German village, his spreading cloak symbolizing the plague spreading through the town!  Faust gazes helplessly, his cloud of hair back-lit, an ostrich egg staring forth from a snowy nest of beard and hair.  It's all amazing!  And to say nothing of the special effects!  There's a scene where the contract appears, written in flaming letters.  If it were filmed today, I'd assume computers were involved - I have no idea how they managed it back in 1926!

Alas, once the contract is signed, the film crystalizes a little bit into a doomed romance between Faust and Gretchen.  In some versions of this story, Gretchen is an angel in disguise who saves Faust in the end, but here she's just a lovely lass from his home town.  While they're falling in love, Mephisto engages in some "humorous" business with the town love-potion-lady.  It's all very droll and Greek-theater-style comical servants.  I never found that crap funny and don't here.  I am a grump.

Unfortunately, I feel I failed this film a bit.  It's very well made and packed full of crazy visuals.  The Mephisto character outright steals every scene he's in, but I started falling asleep mid-way through the film.  This always happens to me with silent movies and I'm not sure why.  I think the lack of dialogue makes it harder for me to pay attention or something.  Anyway, this is a fun film to watch, just see it in the morning!

Alice in the Cities

Saw Alice in the Cities, a slow, spacey Wim Wenders film about a journalist who is stuck taking care of a little girl in New York City and Amsterdam.  They are looking for her family and he is trying to finish an article about road-tripping through the US.  The film is slow and subtle and speaking in a language I don't totally understand.

The idea of road-tripping and hunting for the True America is a concept very quintessentially American in the 70s.  That combined with the frequent blues and rock music on the soundtrack make the film feel very American, even though most of the film takes place in Holland.  The protagonist's situation mirrors the girls in many ways: he is displaced and looking for a place to belong, running out of money, and looking for someone to love him.  In saving her he is perhaps saving himself, although the ending makes this interpretation somewhat ambiguous.

The film is very slow though.  It clocks in at 110 minutes but feels much longer.  Much time is spent watching these two meander around New York or Holland, as simple guitar music and synthesizers fill the empty space.  Other recurrent themes are polaroid photos (which Wim Wenders would return to in his other road trip movies) and music and children.  Frequently the little girl gazes longingly at children who know where they belong.

As for the polaroid photos, they provide some fun threads to pull on: the main character complains that they never look like reality.  This is an interesting observation, but goes nowhere that I follow.  Similarly, he rails at the vulgarity of television and radio, but again this sophomoric notion that everything is an ad nowadays is introduced but dropped again, never to be explored.

It reminded me of Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, those films from the 70s about getting lost and being independent and self-indulgent, and looking for belonging, only this time we have a taciturn journalist and a sulky little girl.  I didn't like those movies (I felt the characters were being a bit too selfish and silly) and suspect I did not fully understand them.  As with those, whatever the thought or the mood or whatever that we're exploring in this film is, it's happening on a wavelength I don't operate on.

Breaking the Waves

Saw Breaking the Waves, a reasonably grueling story about an Irish girl named Bess who loves her husband, Jan, with an all-consuming, self-destroying love.  This love is set in opposition with the faith of her community when Jan becomes paralyzed and, in an effort to get Bess to move on from him, urges and then orders her to take a lover.  How can she obey him as her heart desires, if it flies in the face of her personal faith and of the social mores of her community?

The film is in the spirit of Tess of the D'Urbervilles or the Book of Job: a grinding, miserable tragedy in which we watch in awe as the protagonist weathers storm after storm and is slowly failed by all of her support systems.  It is not a fun film, but it is fascinating to watch this poor girl suffer and yet retain her innocence.  Surprisingly, the husband Jan does not come off badly - his actions seem reasonable to me and I could see myself doing similar things.  Her love, I feel, is just too strong - she loves Jan too much: he wants to sacrifice his claim on her body to save her sanity but she is all too glad to dispose of anything as long as she can remain true to him.  There's a scene where he's leaving to work on an oil derrick and she runs off crying, later found banging a loading crane with a piece of rebar, screaming her despair to the sky.  I mean, that's a big reaction, Bess.

There's many revealing and clever scenes in the film.  The first I wanted to bring up is at her wedding, where her grandfather (one of the church elders) watches disapprovingly as Jan's friends drink cans of beer.  One of the friends crushes his empty beer can, so her grandfather crushes a drinking glass in his fist.  He opens his fist to show the bloody scratches and to show that he is willing to follow his narrow rigidity even to self-destruction.

There's another scene where Bess watches a child's film off-screen.  She's watching in open-mouthed delight and Jan is watching her unbelievingly, like he can't believe anyone could be so pure and wholesome as to be transfixed by this movie.  But this is what is winning about Bess: she comes off as possibly crazy, bizarrely and sometimes grotesquely innocent, but in this innocence she finds joy and delight and this joy wavers, but endures even to the final scenes of the film.  It's heartbreaking but in a kind of uplifting way.  Also, I always enjoy a film about obsessions and madness.

This is an early film by Lars Von Trier, so he hadn't quite embraced his trademark sadism fully, and consequently the film ends as happily as it could.  The last scenes feel a bit jarring and a bit unearned, but I'll take any happiness Von Trier lets slip - statements like that are probably what lead to Dancer In The Dark!