But I'm a Cheerleader (1999)

Saw But I'm a Cheerleader (1999), a very fun, campy film about a cheerleader who is sent off to a gay conversion camp to learn to be straight.  Despite the grim premise, the film quickly reassures us by having the conversion camp be some kind of brightly-colored, plastic-wrapped bizarro-land that can only mean a satire.  Sure enough, the male camp counselor is in love with the handyman, the son of the woman who runs the place prances about in a tank top and booty shorts, it's a romp!

I found the film really touching.  The central cheerleader girl doesn't even realize she's gay at first.  Over time she comes to accept herself and develops an adorable crush, with sidelong glances and tentative hand-touching, it's all so sweet!

And although it is sweet and funny, the film makes no bones about this being the best of a shitty situation.  These poor kids are being forced to fake a life they have no interest in for the worst reasons: satisfying overbearing parents, shame, guilt.  They are clearly not happy with themselves or the roles they are being forced to play.  We see glimpses of gay life outside of the camp and it's more free, but even this is a ghetto, populated by disowned children and elder gays who are making do.  The beauty of the central romance and the fragility of it make it feel so poignant to me.

I've said before that gay romances feel a little too personal to me, a little like the volume is up too high.  I think this is one of those cases.  This is a fun, campy comedy which touches on real issues, but not in any very upsetting ways.  But watching it, I felt like love and romance is already difficult enough.  Why do these poor kids have to have such roadblocks thrown in their way?  It makes me melancholy.

Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)

Saw Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), a film by John Ford about Lincoln's career as a lawyer.  Therefore, it's a court-room drama with sudden reveals and shouted confessions and judges shouting "Order! Order!" and so on.  It's pretty stirring, but it doesn't seem to extend beyond the stirring climactic courtroom drama.  If there are echoes and parallels to Lincoln's presidency, they are not obvious enough for me to pick up on, with my scant knowledge.

The film is the usual thing for John Ford: sentimental and big on the virtues of simple folks and simple values.  Lincoln is portrayed as reading a lawbook lackadaisically, lying on his back by a river.  It's very picturesque and twee.  Thankfully, due to what Lincoln was like as a person, we don't get John Wayne or some other butch paragon out-manning everyone else.  Instead we get a shy and awkward scarecrow, dressed in black, trying to break into politics but unable to enter a dance floor.  It's endearing, even as Ford refuses to sell it that way.

I enjoyed that part of the film and I guess I enjoyed the whole film pretty well in general.  Courtroom dramas are always pretty compelling.  It would be nice if it had some kind of broader theme to draw about the comin civil war, but it does end with mounting storm clouds, and this is a better movie than I could have made.  It was enough.

Leave the World Behind (2023)

Saw Leave the World Behind (2023).  It was a frustrating movie.  It follows a family of husband & wife & son & daughter as they drive out of New York City into the wilds of Long Island for a little impromptu vacation.  Alas, during the vacation something goes terribly terribly wrong in the outside world and all cellphones and TVs go dead.  The exact nature of the disaster never really gets clearly spelled out, but it certainly evokes the early days of the coronavirus pandemic or the shocked chaos of Jan 6th or the bleakest predictions of climate change.  The film is very timely and clearly has big things on its mind.

The frustrating bit is that it's also sort of dumb.  There's scenes where it intercuts many unfolding disasters at the same time to mutually heighten the multiple climaxes of the various plot lines but both times this happens at least one of the so-called "climaxes" is just a non-event, like someone being freaked out by a herd of deer or a kid telling a scary story.  The film is 150 minutes long.  Couldn't we just cut that bit? And I'm going to be mean for a minute here, but at one point the dad of the family is going to drive out to town looking for some news about what's going on.  He encounters a plane that's dropping leaflets.  Stumbling and clumsy in his abject terror, he drives his car as fast as it will drive away from the … information he was … going out to find … ?

Anyway, but the characters in the film say a lot of the right things.  They talk about how we all collectively tend to turn a blind eye to developing disasters until it's too late, how we kid ourselves that we can just buy the right things and somehow spend our way to a more perfect world.  This is rightly called out as the willful ignorance that it is.  Similarly, there's a paraphrase of Alan Moore's insight into conspiracy theories (ie: "The truth is far more frightening: nobody is in control.") which is useful to keep in mind.

There's also some nice work done to symbolically tie the main characters to urban civilization: they always wear blue which is a color which doesn't occur much in nature.  The wife also works in PR and the husband is a professor of Media Studies, and their kids are always on their devices.  At one point they literally say they cannot do anything useful without a cellphone in their hands. (I kept thinking of boomer memes about how kids can't use analog clocks or read cursive.)

But I don't know, the movie just frustrated me.  It seemed unrealistic and clumsy but also like it was trying very hard to be worldly and clear-eyed and grounded.  It came off like a conversation with a teenager whose heart is in the right place, but who is more filled with passion than plans.  It's clearly got things on its mind, but it's not clear how those genuinely interesting things connect to the wild imagery and mounting excitement that's driving it.  I couldn't make it cohere anyway, maybe you'll have better luck.

Lolita (1962)

Saw Lolita (1962).  Ok, here we go.  It's times like this I'm glad that this blog is only read by about 3 people because this film is an adaptation of the Nabokov book by the same name which is famous for somehow disabling everyone's media literacy.  This film is pretty true to that legacy.  Here we go.

The film is about a pedophile named Humbert Humbert who falls in love with Lolita, the 12-year old daughter of his landlady.  The source novel is written from his point of view and, if you read between the lines, elides and omits many details in order to frame the abuse as romantic and reciprocated.  There are some stories which try to cultivate sympathy for the pedophile (The Woodsman comes to mind) but this is not one of those films.  We are supposed to be outraged by his hypocrisy and his willful self-delusion, slowly dawning on us as we realize he is an unreliable narrator.  This film plays a similar trick but it's much more subtle.  We don't get narration from Humbert, for example, and we are never clued in to the fact that this film is from a Humbertish point of view.  You need to read between the lines.

Humbert ultimately runs away with Lolita to pursue an abusive relationship and the film is roughly divided into two halves: before the runaway and after.  Before the runaway the film is shot like a 1960s sex comedy, with lonely piano teachers and widows clad in cougarish leopard print.  Humbert is uninterested in all of this tawdry flirting, but in this hot-house atmosphere, Lolita's teenage contempt for her mother comes off like a romantic rivalry with Humbert as the imagined object of her jealousy.  After the runaway, the film shifts into more of a thriller, as policemen, doctors, teenage boys, and casting directors all vie for Lolita's attention.  Once again, her fear about what's happening takes on a double meaning to Humbert: her secretiveness and lies are not because she wants to escape (he imagines) but because she is falling for some other man.

Finally, the film plays a last trick on us of indicting our society in Lolita's exploitation.  Lolita is made to be seductive, often propping her feet up, showing off long legs, her smooth face crinkling as she says "Gee, well keep in touch!"  Through Humbert's eyes, we never really see her trying to escape his grasp.  What she's actually doing away from him remains a mystery.  The trappings of the sex comedy and thriller genres also act to obscure what's really going on.  It's easy to fall into the mindset of these genres, and we have to keep reminding ourselves that this is a lens we're seeing through.  The seeming romantic rival is just a snotty teenager acting out and the seeming femme fatale is just a scared teenage girl, thrust into a situation beyond her years.

This film is a sort of dark comedy, a satire which uses the cliches of other films to convey the warped understanding of the protagonist.  It is not obvious satire however and it's apparently very easy to miss satire even when it's quite blunt.  As with the novel, I suspect that some people will view this as somehow condoning the events in the film, apologizing rather than condemning.  I suspect also that, like with Wall Street and Romper Stomper, the very folks the film attempts to skewer will wind up enjoying it sincerely.

Alas, a daring and complex film which is only becoming more fraught and problematic over time.  It's not a bad film, but a difficult one.

The Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

Saw The Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), a Bubsy Berkly musical farce about a theater company which is able to put on one last big show (aren't they always one last big show?) due to a surprise injection of cash from an upcoming composer.  Now, I feel to say more would spoil the film a little, so let's be vague: the film involves the showgirls gleefully fleecing a domineering financier.  The stage production that they're putting on is the usual thing for Bubs: a random smattering of spectacular nonsense completely disconnected to the main plot and to each other.  The one notable exception to this is the show-stopping final number, The Forgotten Man, which pays homage to the abandoned veterans of WW1.  It's very moving.

The point of the film is the dance numbers.  The plot zips along and this is pre-code, so there's swearing and kissing and all manner of immoral licentiousness, but the core idea of rolling a well-to-do villain is a little dated and the 20s-style patter, although witty, is never really laugh-out-loud.  Oh but those dance sequences!  Let me tell you!

In one of the sequences, the chorus girls play violins.  In the middle of the sequence the lights go out and the violins light up with fluorescent tubes as the dancers circle and make complex geometric patterns for Bubsy's signature crane shot.  In one scene, we focus up real tight on a woman's gloved hand holding a white rose against an ink black background.  The visual is striking!  Such pretty choreography, such a strange mixture of pokey old fashion and timeless dazzle.

The film is interesting, but a little aged.  Be aware that you're going in to an old-timey film and you'll be fine.  There's no blackface, mercifully, and the war of the sexes ends at stealing a rich bad guy's money.  If you can stomach that, go see the film.  It's worth seeing at least one Bubsy Berkly film, just to see what all the fuss is about.

The Silence (1963)

Saw The Silence, a film following a boy and his mother and his aunt as they stop off in a fictional European city while travelling home.  The film is a strange mixture of slowness and intensity.  It opens with the three of them laying half-asleep in a train car, sweat trickling down their brows as they lol in the carriage.  Suddenly the aunt coughs up blood.  This is the film in a nutshell: nothing happens, and then something alarming happens.

The nature of the relationship between the mother and the aunt is left tantalizingly ambiguous.  Although the aunt is sick, she has a domineering, possessive attitude towards the mother.  Is this some latent lesbianism?  Some prudish guard over the mother's affairs?  At one point they seem to be on the verge of kissing, but in another moment the mother accuses the aunt of interrogating her, grilling her for information about a date she went on.  Where does the aunt get her sense of entitlement to the mother?  Is it familial or romantic or (god help us) perhaps both?

To add to the confusion between the aunt and the mother, the aunt is a translator.  At one point the boy's mother says "Isn't it wonderful that we can't understand each other?"  There's a theme of communication vs a sort of ambiguous non-communication.  The supporting cast all speak a made-up nonsense language invented for the film.  There seems to be a tension between a sort of conquering and categorization that the aunt is engaged with vs the mute feminine mystique of the mother.  The mother never explains herself, and we are not usually allowed to see what she's up to.

To add even more to the confusion, most of the film is shot from the boy's perspective.  We see tanks passing by the train windows in the opening scenes, but they are clearly toy tanks.  We follow the bored child as he runs around the hallways of the hotel they're staying in.  We watch him laboriously draw a picture.  Is any of this in his head?  Is this young boy fantasizing about his mother and aunt?  It is confusing.

Mostly however it is slow.  There are shots of boobies and a few sex scenes which raised eyebrows in the 60s but which is nothing too shocking by today's standards (still though, it might be awkward to watch with your parents) however, like Last Year In Marienbad, most of the film feels slow and boring and stuffy.  I watched it right after lunch and perhaps fell into a food coma, but really.  The film is 90 minutes long but it feels much longer.  Maybe my attention span is just shot?

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)

Saw Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023), a fantasy comedy film about a band of adventurers who are trying to pull off a heist to steal the treasure in this lord's castle.  It's based in the DnD universe/set of rules and feels very DnD-ish.  Everyone gets their little moment to shine and there's episodic dungeons and looting and leveling up and all.  Tremendous fun!

I don't really have any deep thoughts about this film.  It was a lot of dumb fun.  The world it lives in is very simple and straightforward.  It's sometimes ambiguous what characters' true intentions are, but only in the aid of big reveals.  All the baddies are pretty obviously bad and the goodies are pretty straightforwardly good.  It's simple but also fun.  I enjoyed it.

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978)

Saw The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), a joyously dark film about Maria who is married to a man just before he's deployed to the front of Germany.  They spend one night together and then Maria loses her husband.  The war ends shortly after and she must sift through the wreckage of Germany, searching for any trace of her one true love.

As the film wears on, it becomes a character study of Maria, and a meditation on the nature of love.  Maria's love for her husband becomes an obsession, fueling her struggle to survive, fueling her ambition, her journey to greatness and success.  She takes many lovers but refuses to marry any of them.  She is looked at with disdain by her mother and her friends, but she smiles with open glee as she discovers her mother has also taken a lover, her friend's marriage is falling apart.

The film is peculiarly both cynical and idealistic: the way Maria exploits her lovers and chuckles at their protestations of love seems very cynical, but Maria's uncomplicated love for her husband seems sweet, even as it drives her to steal and cheat, to break hearts in pursuit of becoming a woman worthy of her man.

I enjoyed the movie, even as it was sort of slow and pokey.  The whole thing is rich and fraught, dangerous and sweet.  Maria may not be the hero, but she's compelling to watch as she unravels in the face of her own all-consuming love.

Werewolves Within (2021)

 Saw Werewolves Within (2021), a murder mystery about small town inhabitants being terrorized (maybe) by a werewolf.  It takes place in the remote town of Beaverfield, deep in the wilds of Vermont, populated by only about a dozen people.  It's based on a social deduction video game and feels a lot like a social deduction game.  Everyone splits up, confers and witnesses things and then regroup in the main area to hurl accusations and plan for survival.

The film is kind of a horror comedy and it involves a lot of over-the-top and sort of winkingly cliched characters.  There's a manic pixie dream girl and a crazed dog-mom, a gay couple who are are tres swish.  There was a fair amount to laugh at but also (as with social deduction games) I felt a frustrating irritation with not knowing what's actually going on.  There's a lot of screaming and running about like in the movie Clue, lots of frantic activity to no avail.  It's funny in a camp way.

I thought it was interesting that the film also wove in some slight contemporary commentary.  There are clear right-wing/left-wing politics at play, and a proposed pipeline divides the town, and not along party lines either.  I don't think the film really digs deeply into those divisions but they're such a part of normal life that it feels weird sometimes that movies don't deal with it.  It's like the deafening silence after 9/11 when movies were scrubbing shots of the New York skyline, delaying releases, and not daring to touch the tragedy.  I'd be curious to see if we ever deal with this cold civil war going on in the country.

Anyway, the film was good and kept me guessing right up until the end.  I learned long ago not to try to second-guess films however, so no points for that.  More importantly, it kept me entertained and amused for 90 minutes, and really that's all anyone can ask for.

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)

Saw Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), another film about somewhat wretched lives lived in those brick tenements in London.  This time, the film is set in the 30s-to-50s I guess, and is sort of an ethnography, documenting mostly the songs of the period.  The film alternates between vignettes of major life events (weddings, funerals, hospitalizations) and then sing-alongs at the pub.  It felt like looking through someone else's photo album: full of fragments of people's lives and pokey old memories you have to struggle to understand.

I found the film to be a bit of a sleeper, a bit of a downer.  It starts off with some really sad business involving the abusive father of the family, beating his wife and daughters, coldly refusing to acknowledge his son.  The film keeps up a slow but steady trickle of tragedy mixed in with old songs sung beautifully.  Some of the characters find happiness, others find sorrow, mostly it's a mix, but life goes on you know?  And there's another round and another song.  I've seen this kind of film before.  It's a sort of sweet film in the end, I guess, but it's slow, distant, not exactly detached but not delving deeply into any of these characters.

On a completely unrelated note, I watched this film because it appears on the top 1000 movies of all time list (here) which I'm watching in increasing order of ranking (starting at #1 and working my down to #1000).  The top films are all available for a price on premium streaming services (netflix, and paramount, and youtube rentals) then there was a dry patch where it was hard to find some films, but now they're all available free on Tubi!  I sonder what streaming service I'll start using as I go farther down the list.

Barbie (2023)

Saw Barbie (2023), a film about the famous doll, beloved of children everywhere.  So first let me say: this film was not made for me.  I enjoyed it, but I have not kept on top of the cultural conversation around feminism well enough to really grapple with this film.  I enjoyed it okay, I just feel I didn't totally get it.

So okay, here's my impression of the film: it felt fun and funny but it felt like 3 films colliding.  One plot line is about the titular Barbie becoming disenchanted with her world of glamorous pretend, one plot line is kind of a critique of the performative faux-progressivism of the Barbie line ("she can be a cook!  A teacher!  A nurse!  Barbie can do anything!") and the last plot line is about Barbie's relationship with her boyfriend Ken who is becoming frustrated and bitter, living in Barbie's shadow.  These are all complex topics and I could have used some more talking down to.

I didn't get the sense that the film is all that progressive.  It was built as a big-budget film, so some restraint and punch-pulling is expected.  I felt like we could've done without Ken having as major a role, but him being sidelined is a big part of the film and it feels important to include something about why men might feel resentful and what that resentment drives them too.  (On that note, I found Ken's new-found and quirky sense of masculinity hilarious and horrible.)  But, including a strong sub-plot about Ken's resentment towards Barbie makes it feel culture-war-ish to me, like a battle of the sexes when there needn't be.  It feels like a bit of a muddle to me but, as stated above, it is perhaps a muddle only in my mind.

But okay. All that aside, the film is solid.  I was entertained and made to feel tenderness and pity, made to smile and laugh.  The closing scenes are beautiful and lovely.  I felt a bit of the ick around Ken's business, but okay nothing I can't handle.  Not my fave film (but then, what is?) but not bad at all.

The Long Goodbye (1973)

Saw The Long Goodbye (1973), a noir film directed by Robert Altman.  It was shot in Altman's usual style: heavily improvised, naturalistic and sarcastic, full of amiable shagginess.  The film was apparently billed as a send-up of the noir genre, and it contains many wacky elements, but it's sort of like The Big Lebowski: it's a real noir but the main character is largely disinterested.  In the case of The Big Lebowski it's because the main character is in over his head, but in this case, it's because the main character would rather laze around his apartment, admiring his female neighbors doing topless yoga.  It's funny to watch the character's barely-masked frustration as a gang of toughs or cops or whatever break down his door once more.

There's real violence in the film as well, mixed in with this goofing.  There's one really shocking scene involving a psychotic Jewish mob boss and a bottle of coke.  There's also gun-shots and deaths and so on.  It all seems to serve counterpoint to the light attitude of the main character.  He's played as being good at his job but so bored with the frustrations of it that he begins joking with everyone, just to relieve the tension, but if it was just him joking around he'd come off like an insufferable know-it-all, so some violence and some confusion help to ground him a little.

I enjoyed the film.  It kept my attention and wasn't obnoxious.  It contained boobs and blood, but it seemed to wink, to kind of understand that these were genre clichés that it was including, not for themselves, but as set-dressing.  Anyway, I liked the film.  It was good.

BlackBerry (2023)

Saw BlackBerry (2023), a docudrama about the creation of the first smartphone to really make it big.  It's billed as a comedy and contains many comical element, but it's in the manner of the Silicon Valley show: it's zippy and fast-paced, but much of it is just how tech business works as far as I understand it.  There are man-child nerd-bros hanging out and eating pizza and working on diabolical tech problems, and then there's the sharks in suits stalking the halls, trying to negotiate deals and pitch products.  It's very fun to watch.

So, I liked the film.  The conversations between the nerds are very true to life, both the dumbfounded incomprehension of meeting someone who is not familiar with Star Wars and also the techno-babble brain-storming sessions ("Ok, so we can't shrink the data, what if we spread it out instead") There's also a major character who is the spirit of goof-off tech start-up culture.  He's scrappy and probably won't amount to much (I mean, ordinarily, in a company that didn't get a docudrama made about it) but he's not there to get rich, he's there to play with tech.  He becomes the moral compass of the film, even as he remains an irrelevant, slightly self-important doof.  I have met this guy dozens of times.

The film is not uproariously hilarious.  I watched the trailer and it contains most of the best jokes, but watching the boardroom shenanigans is tremendous fun.  90% of the film is watching our heroes rise to power and fortune and that's just lovely.  As we all know, BlackBerry's are no longer the ubiquitous smart-phone, so we know this story has to end on a long slow decline, but the rise is fun to watch and the character are lovely.  A fun film!

All That Jazz (1979)

Saw All That Jazz (1979), a movie-movie about a stage and movie director near the end of his life, facing down his own irrelevancy and crumbling health.  The film is very kaleidoscopic, voice-overs and background conversations and serious meanings behind frivolous smiles are all layered on top each other.  The effect is initially bewildering, however once you get into the groove of the film, it serves to get us into the bewildered mind of the protagonist, how he's tormented by his own artificiality and regrets, how he keeps a happy face on it all which he himself sometime despises.  There's a scene late in the film where he says "I hate showbusiness." and another character responds "You love show business."

I didn't love the film.  It's good, but I liked Confessions of a Dangerous Mind better, and saw it first.  The film is also apparently inspired by 8½, by Fellini, which I've also seen.  Unlike those films, this one has more of a smeary, soft-focus look, ala Terry Guilliam's movies (I'm thinking about Time Bandits here) it also has the intentionally tawdry feel of Cabaret which was directed by the same director and which I enjoyed.  This one was interesting and had some good thoughts about self-destruction vs self-sacrifice, and about the dual artificiality and sincerity of showbusiness, I just wasn't in the mood I guess.

Heart of a Dog (2015)

Saw Heart of a Dog (2015), a documentary directed by Laurie Anderson about the death of her dog.  It's a looping, discursive film however, which touches on 9/11, dreams, memories, many deaths, and on her dog's short-lived musical career.  It's terribly poignant and yet sometimes oddly funny.  It grabbed my attention in the first anecdote, when Laurie is describing her mother's death.  As Laurie narrates to us, her mother seemed to believe that she was at a party of some kind with animals, as she was drying.  "Thank you for having me." Laurie says, and you cannot tell if she is talking on behalf of her mother or on behalf of herself and perhaps it is both.

The film is very sad, naturally, but is a good meditation on loss.  It's composited together from a bunch of random shots of her dog, of her neighborhood, of old home movies.  It's narrated by Laurie in a clear, precise tone, weaving together disparate threads of western and eastern philosophy, casually saying funny, tragic things.

It's a heartbreaking film, but in a gentle, soothing way, like talking to an understanding therapist about loss, or like reminiscing over memories of dead friends.  Sad but nice, not melancholy, but wistful.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)

Saw Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), a character study about Arthur, an overgrown lad who works in a factory of some kind in the miserable brick tenement houses of post-war England.  His surroundings are grim and cramped, full of spying neighbors and drunken brawls.  Arthur drinks heavily and carries on with women, trying to wring as much short-term happiness out of his life as he can.  He's not a bad guy, but he is irresponsible and will cause a lot of unhappiness.

Arthur opens the film with an internal monologue sneering at the factory workers and at his boss.  "Don't let the bastards grind you down." he thinks "I'd like to see someone try to grind me down." We know that it doesn't work like that of course.  It's not someone who grinds you down, it's everyone; it's just life that wears you out and shrinks your dreams until they are as tawdry as merely wanting a new television set.  Arthur is rebellious, pugnacious, lashing out at whoever looks like authority, even if that person is also a put-upon victim, even when he is defending senseless vandalism.  He's deeply selfish in a proto-70s way, but young enough that I felt bad for him.  He hasn't yet accepted that he's doomed.

This film contains seeds of the staunch individualism championed in films of the 70s: the loner who resists society, who defends their freedom even as it costs them their friends and family.  Those films always frustrate me because it seems so unnecessary and cruel: the protagonists are always lost and somewhat joyless in their quest to discover themselves, the society they're rejecting seems so harmless and normal, what's their problem?  In this film however Arthur seems full of devilish glee as he skates from one disaster to another, and the society he's in looks realistically hopeless.

Another thing this film gets right is that they added another character to serve as contrast: a workmate who is easy-going and agreeable, sheep-like accepting of his fate.  This character is given dignity and even respect in the end.  He's not shown as the victor (he's clearly taken advantage of many times in the film) but he's left as an alternative: much easier, much more boring, but available to those who don't want to struggle.  It's an interesting film.

The Outsider: the story of Harry Partch (2002)

Saw The Outsider: the story of Harry Partch (2002), a brief documentary about an avantgarde musician, Harry Partch, who drew inspiration from Greek and primitive, pre-twelve-note-scale music.  He spent some time as a hobo in his youth, and also drew inspiration from the accents and intonations of people as they whined or celebrated or bragged.  He created giant, whimsical instruments that sound utterly alien, prehistoric.  The film talks about him in fond terms before leaving him alone.  Harry worried, in his later life, that he would become a strange curio, fossilized like other composers before him.  I think he had a canny understanding of how the world works.

Blow Out (1981)

Saw Blow Out (1981), a Brian De Palma twist on Blow Up by Antonioni.  In Blow Up, a photographer accidentally takes a photo of an assassination.  In this film, Blow Out, an audio engineer records some tape which proves that an accident was actually a murder.  The film is uneven, at turns lurid and crass, but sometimes fleetingly sublime.

The protagonist is played by John Travolta who acts like an overgrown teenager.  The script he's given forces him to claim that he was always an AV geek, a science nerd.  I get the impression he's supposed to be a nebbish guy swept up in bigger events, or a nervous, driven kind of guy, as in The Conversation, but he's played with Travolta's easy cool-guy charm and it's a strange sell for me.  The scene is completely stolen by a small-time blackmailer for me anyway.  I loved that horrible little guy!

The film involves a lot of prostitutes, blackmail, borderline-pornographic horror films, a lot of sleazy tawdry stuff.  From De Palma's other films, I get the sense that this is his jam, like Tarantino: he loves glittery trash.  But there's sequences in the film that also evoke Hitchcock.  There's a scene near the climax where a woman is hauled up some stairs.  We just see the woman and her attacker, and the big broad side on the stairs lit up with flashing lights.  It's very classy, very restrained, and then, shortly after, the camera revolves around the main characters as fireworks go off overhead, a surreal and wonderous image that evokes the indulgences or Baz Luhrmann.  There are sequences that are wooden and dull or silly, but others that are taught or quiet or well-observed.  An uneven film.  I should see more of De Palma, to see if I like him or not.

Reefer Madness (1931)

Saw Reefer Madness (1931), the original film that all the musicals and whatnot were based on.  It was very campy.  It follows a small group of teenagers who fall in with a Bad Crowd.  That is: smokers of the terrible drug spelled marihuana.  The teenagers begin smoking the evil stuff and react in the typical manner of the dope fiend: hilarious laughing, close-ups of swiveling eyeballs, writhing and gibbering, also murder.

The film is so over the top, so full of pearl-clutching horror and completely inaccurate portrayals of weed smoking that you can't help but lapse into the same old-timey cadence.  It's hilarious!  The film invites a lot of participation and, at one hour long, feels like a good appetizer to a party, but the subject is very overwrought.  It ends with several deaths and some very hysterical dames.  The plot is very grim in a morality tale kind of way, so I felt bad making fun of it in my head, but once the terrible tale is fully told, it's a joy to imitate, to froth at the mouth at something so relatively tame.  I can see why this film became a cult classic.  I imagine it's not even that fun to watch high, it's just fun to play along with the film, to be aghast at teenagers, necking (necking!) while demonic, jolly piano music plays!

Dersu Uzala (1975)

Saw Dersu Uzala (1975), an unusual film which combines the direction of legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa with the technicians of the USSR.  The plot of the film follows a Russian surveyor who befriends a hunter, the titular Dersu, in the wilds of Russia.  It's sort of boy's own adventure with the two of them getting lost in the forest and surviving thanks to Dersu's survivalist know-how.  The film does Kurosawa's usual thing of being stirring, but ultimately sweet and sentimental.  This film is also on a list of 45 great films that the Vatican put out for some reason.

The film spends a lot of time in open-mouthed awe of the hunter Dersu.  It's unclear why he imprints on the main character, but he follows him around, saving him from danger, performing super-natural feats of marksmanship, talking of the wind and the snow as though they were people, and generally being a back-woods superman.  He is the true man, the true survivor whom we all aspire to be like and whom modern civilization has destroyed.  In a testament to Kurosawa's skill as a filmmaker, I was all set to hate Dersu and even I, dainty curmudgeon that I am, even I liked him by the end.

The opening scene of the film shows the surveyor in a new shanty-town being constructed.  The surveyor asks strangers for help but cannot find Dersu's grave (this is the opening scene, recall), so we know things won't end up great.  To make matters worse, the surveyor cannot find the grave, and to make matters even worse, the surveyor no doubt had a part in making this shanty-town come into existence, what with his surveying and all.  He, the modern man, has betrayed Dersu, not only by eradicating him, but somehow by being not as wise, not as spiritual as him, and the surveyor is us, and we are all incited.

I didn't really dig this film.  I've never been very interested in living off the grid and roughing it and so on.  It all seems vaguely condemnatory (and I tried to lay out above why it feels that way to me) and I'm not sure what the solution is.  We can think romantically of the wilderness we no longer live in, but it's much comfier to live in a house than in a series of lean-tos and huts, so I think this is an improvement?  I don't know.  Perhaps I am too comfortable and lazy and crass to truly get into the film's groove.  A miss for me.

The Death of Dick Long (2019)

Saw The Death of Dick Long (2019), a thriller/mystery film where the details of what actually happened are gradually revealed to us viewers but we do know that something very bad happened during a wild party/hangout session and it wound up with a man seriously injured and his two friends scrambling to cover their tracks.  I found it a fairly sad film.

The film bill itself as a crime comedy, and there's a lot of desperate scrambling which could be comical, I guess.  I found myself feeling worse and worse for the protagonists (who are the un-injured friends, above) as their lies mount and their bumbling confusion exposes them further and further.  The most reliable source of actual laughs for me is a dim-witted lesbian cop who doesn't understand nick-names and is generally harmlessly amusing.

The film is set in a non-specific small-town where people talk in a southern twang.  The atmosphere at first seems pleasantly busy but soon becomes oppressively claustrophobic.  One shot early on shows the main characters driving past a trio of women sitting at a patio table, and all three women turn to stare at their car as they drive past.  Everything they do is watched by bored, baleful, listless eyes.  The worst is the main character's daughter.  She's supposed to be irritatingly precocious, full of "No, daddy, that's not right.  You said [extremely incriminating thing he said] remember?" I was on edge enough.  She made my skin crawl.

Anyway, the film certainly held my attention and the payoff when you're allowed to understand what exactly went down is satisfyingly shocking, but somehow I wasn't in the right mood.  I felt awful for the poor main characters, trying their damnedest but too dumb and incompetent to be effective, trapped in a hostile and suspicious world.  Their panic and grief is given almost Hitchcockian weight, and then they say something like "Oh, we didn't think that one through did we?"  Obviously comical, but it made me feel too bad for them to laugh.

Claire's Knee (1971)

Saw Claire's Knee (1971), a French film about a man who is about to enter into a companionate marriage with his friend.  Prior to the wedding, he visits a house full of women on the beach of some nice lake.  There's an author woman, who is the main character's friend, another woman who owns the house, and the owner's two daughters.  Clair is one of the daughters and is very pretty, but dating a muscular lunkhead.  The other daughter, Laura, develops a school-girl crush on the main character, but the main character only has eyes for the other daughter: Clair.

The film reminded me strongly of Call Me By Your Name.  There's a similar floating, too many days on vacation kind of feel to it and also a somewhat off-putting central romance with a large age gap.  This film is somewhat more tame however (although fruit are involved (cherries) no one ever fucks a peach.)  The main character discusses his feelings with the author woman and in the end they contextualize the whole affair as neatly as a Victorian novel, explaining to each other how not only did nothing improper happen, but it was all for the greater good in the end, reveling in their own paradox.

I found the film a little tedious.  I think I was too sleepy to give it fair shake, but I wasn't able to understand what it really all about.  We see the protagonist interact with many women, see him be pursued, see him do the pursuing.  I suppose this is meant to be a commentary on the relationship between men and women, but we just sort of get a sampler pack instead of diving deep into any one thing.  What's it all for?  The film is shot in perpetually shining, sunny days and the dialogue is all delivered in a polite and pleasant manner, in the style of a dinner conversation debating philosophy.  It's all very pretty and pleasant, but what I'm supposed to dig into under this pleasant exterior is a mystery to me.

This film felt a little like lazing about in a waterfront cottage: a little boring, a little catty, very pretty, but very little going on.  I think I missed this one.

Swiss Army Man (2016)

Saw Swiss Army Man (2016), a very twee film about a man trapped on a desert island who is able to make his way home with the help of a talking corpse.  As with many films which have corpses as major characters, it's a film about taking chances and embracing life, being true to yourself etc.  There's also some elements of parenthood as well, since the main character must teach the corpse about life and love and fear and so on.  These themes are explored more deeply in the director's next major film: Everything Everywhere All at Once (which is a better film, in my opinion.)

Anyway, this one is a strange film with many things on its mind, but it doesn't say those things clearly enough for me to hear.  There's a clear message about being true to yourself but there's a hefty dose of Michel Gondry-style lo-fi whimsy that was a little too much for me, but your mileage may vary.  The film has elements of a survival film and of a comedy but it winds up being sort of a rom-com between the main character and the corpse who also may represent the main character in some capacity (his inner child?)  It's interesting but odd.

So that's this film: interesting and odd.  It's full of strange conversations and unusual visuals, sort of in the same mold as Dave Made a Maze.  It's not as complex as Everything Everywhere, but it contains similar themes of radical acceptance and a sort of sweet sincerity.  It's an alright movie.

India Song (1975)

Saw India Song (1975), an extremely slow, extremely arty film about a French diplomat and his wife who is carrying on multiple affairs.  This is all told to us via voice-over while slow endless shots of characters sitting in poses plays out on the film.  Several still shots are so still, you can only tell that it's not a photograph by the smoke moving in the background.  The diplomat's wife stares inscrutably at the camera while her coterie of boyfriends surround her.

I feel this movie was too arty for me.  It reminded me a lot of Last Year At Marienbad which may be the most grueling movie I've ever sat through.  This one was a hair more accessible and its themes were more apparent, but it's just so slow, so arid and inaccessible.  I longed for a car chase.

Anyway, about those themes: they are the conventional ones of colonialist stories: ennui, lack of meaning and purpose, the vague feeling that you're losing the culture of your homeland and being corrupted by the native culture.  They talk a lot about lepers, underlining the corruption theme.  The diplomat is aware of his wife's affairs, but is indifferent.  One character asks another if anyone ever gets used to the heat.  "I hope no one ever does." is the response.

So boy howdy I did not like this film.  It comes from the list of top 1000 films as compiled by They Shoot Pictures dot com, clocking in at #449, so I assume there's something good here I'm just too addled to understand.  I will concede that it is different, but it's not different in a good way.  I feel it should have been a radio play.

Hey Good Lookin' (1982)

Saw Hey Good Lookin' (1982), an edgy animated film from enfant terrible Ralph Bakshi, creator of American Pop, Fritz the Cat, and Coonskin.  The title of that last film should clue you in to the kind of creator Ralph Bakshi is: crude, boundary-pushing, daring.  His films try to depict a warts-and-all look at some adventure.  Almost all of his films have parts that have aged very badly.

This one is in the usual Bakshi style: very loose, very natural, you can almost see the actors in the sound booth, kidding  around and interrupting each other.  It follows Jimmy who is a wanna-be leader of a gang of greasers in 1950s New York.  They run afoul of another gang and now must "rumble".  So Jimmy spends the film trying to drum up enthusiasm for the rumble while also constantly smooching his love interest.  It's like Saturday Night Fever meets West Side Story, only a cartoon.

It was a ripping yarn, clocking in at a brief 77 minutes.  There are bits where it drags a hair or suffers from awkward pacing, but it always zips along, at the very least pushing grotesque, Triplets of Belleville-level grotesques in your face.  The main character looks the most attractive of the lot and even he looks oddly simian at times.  A good, strange film, as expected from this creator.

Faces (1968)

Saw Faces (1968), a black and white film in the style of a French new wave film: middle-aged men in suits talking endlessly about relationships.  Unlike French new wave, this film does have some clear-cut dramatic stakes: we're seeing a marriage end rather abruptly.  After the announcement is made that they want a divorce, we follow the fallout for the two characters.  Both are avoidant and miserable, seeking comfort in night clubs and prostitutes as they celebrate their new freedom, try to grapple with their new lives.

The film consists of about 4 or so scenes.  They all involve drunk people laughing uproariously and joking and bickering and eventually bearing their souls, but this is the tension about this film for me: that the soul bearing is very interesting and poignant, but the scene keeps going on.  The soul-bearer becomes ashamed and must be wheedled back into a good humor.  Drunken belligerent men must be honeyed and kidded out the door.  The scenes wear on like a party that's dwindled down to four guests.  And there's interesting stuff to be had at the tail end of a party, but it's a little bit of a slog being there.  There's also a few times I totally lost the thread.  I couldn't tell if the smash cut was a dream or a memory or a flash-forward or what.

So the film is slow but interesting and is shot in a very naturalistic style which allegedly influenced Robert Altman.  It's a deep look at the culture of the 60s with its corny jokes and "boy I tell ya"s.  It made the strange dialogue of old plays a little more comprehensible to me.  It was a little too slow for my poor addled brains, but it was an adventure anyway.

The Endless (2017)

Saw The Endless (2017), an indie mumble-core sort of horror directed by the same guys who directed Resolution which I was not too terribly jazzed about.  Once again, we have a high-concept sort of horror which can be thought of as being a closely related to movies themselves.  It's a sort of post-modern twist.  So it's very clever, yes, but once again it's not terribly interesting to me.  I'm afraid I'm just not motivated by chilly concepts.  I get it, the way that I get the Pythagorean theorem, but it's not compelling to me as a story.

So okay, the plot starts out with two brothers who have escaped a cult.  They are struggling to make it in the outside world and the younger brother yearns for the life he enjoyed as a teenager ie: the cult.  So they decide to go back for a quick little visit (which, judging from what I know about cults is at least a horrible idea) and there they find some weird rock totems, some spookily calm cultists, and exotic drugs.  It evokes a sort of twee, indie Midsommar before it finally reveals the nature of the horror.

So it's an odd duck of a film.  It didn't beguile me clearly but it's low-key charming and very different.  It's very similar to Resolution, so if you liked that, give this a look because it's very much the same movie.

I Am Cuba (1964)

Saw I Am Cuba (1964), a USSR-produced propaganda film about the (at the time) ongoing struggle  for Cuban liberation.  It's composed of a bunch of short vignettes all revolving around the struggle for freedom against (usually) Americans or against corrupt government entities.  It also contains a ton of wonderful and dizzying long continuous shots.  In one shot, we're following a funeral procession.  We start in a close up of a woman's face, then we rise higher and higher, entering into a window where men are rolling cigars.  They rush to the opposite window to watch the procession continue and we follow after them, swooping through the window and down the street like an angel.

Because the film is supposed to be propaganda, the film's vignettes are very obvious and simple: a woman foolishly rejects her poor but good-hearted boyfriend in order to pick up lusty Americans at a bar who glibly exploit her.  A student is radicalized by seeing how the police treat his revolutionist friends.  This film is not only a call to action but a frank call to violence.  In the last two vignettes, the characters are punished for not being sufficiently bloodthirsty, for not being willing to fire a gun.

Humorously, no one was pleased with this film when it came out.  The Cubans felt it was too romantic, that it portrayed them too preciously.  The Russians thought it was too artistic, that it was too "artistic" and not straightforward enough.  Pity the poor director.  The film is very pretty and gorgeously shot.  The camera cocks back and forth like the head of a confused puppy, letting buildings loom over characters' faces before rocking back into a tight closeup.  The camera work is phenomenal.

The story is simplistic and it allows everything to stay at a hind-brain level.  We're here to struggle with ambiguities.  We're here to feel righteous indignation and to feel pity for the poor beleaguered farmers, or students, or prostitutes.  It's a straightforward film.  Beautiful but simple in its goals.

The Spine of Night (2021)

Saw The Spine of Night (2021), a rotoscoped animated film in the spirit of Heavy Metal or something by Ralph Bakshi.  It opens with a naked woman walking up a mountainside, her breasts swinging as she slogs through the snow, so you know this isn't a cartoon for children.  It's set in a vaguely medieval fantasy world with barbarians and men in cloaks and so one.  The plot follows a power struggle kicked off by a mysterious blue flower which is capable of all sorts of magic: healing, visions, fireballs, etc.  It's an unusual movie and a fairly solid bit of escapism.  It's pretty hammy but is also the passion-project of a small handful of people, so points for that.

The film felt a lot like an animated sequence from a video game.  The acting is broad and loud.  Evil people all whine through their noses and do the Kubrick stare thing.  Good characters are similarly one-dimensional and sometimes seem to be unaware of their surroundings due to either voice or pacing problems, all of this adds to the general feel of videogamish unreality.  It's also incredibly violent.  People are beheaded, disemboweled, and straight-up bisected constantly.  After the first fifteen minutes or so however, I was able to accept that I was not watching high art and was able to enjoy myself much more.

The film is very self-indulgent but it's also a lot of campy fun.  Characters say things like "Be careful.  I can smell the rotting pages of your books, scholar.  They will do little good when the crows come to pluck the eyes from your skull.  Doom comes to the pantheon.  Doom comes to Pyre!  Doom!  Ha ha ha ha ha ha!  Doom!  Ha ha ha ha ha ha!  Dooooom!"  Like oh my god I can't help but enjoy this.  It's very goofy, but with a sort of synthwave over-seriousness that winks at the audience.  There's also some absolutely lovely matte paintings to look at.  All in all not a bad film.  Not very serious but still a bunch of fun.

Thelma & Louise (1991)

Saw Thelma & Louise (1991), a very fun wish fulfillment film about two women who have been beaten down by conventional life.  Louise is a tough waitress who is dissatisfied and mostly ignored.  Thelma is a housewife to a man who clearly regards her as property: the trophy wife whose job it is to stay home and be shouted at.  So they head out of town on for a change but one of the women is sexually assaulted and her assailant is shot in the heart, and the two women are suddenly deep on the wrong side of the law.  At first they're utterly panicked about the loss of their old lives, but from the ashes of that old life rises a new sense of possibility and purpose which is lovely to behold.

The film is tragic in parts, but mostly uplifting.  It's a feminist revenge fantasy: the ignored and belittled woman finally striking back against the world, forcing their way through it for once.  It's a little on-the-nose in a few scenes however.  There's a scene where the cops are urging Thelma's husband, Jimmy, to keep Thelma talking for as long as possible: "If she calls, just be gentle. You know, like, you're really happy to hear from her. Like you really miss her. Women love that shit."  Jimmy grins and laughs at this truism.  Later on, as the film is near its end, we close up on Thelma's husband who is sitting, stricken and aghast, listening to the cops closing in on her.  This is supposed to be a cathartic scene where the asshole husband finally sees the error of his ways, but this is too sudden, too unbelievable to me.

My understanding is that people are cruel because they lack empathy.  They don't recover their empathy when they hear about criminal activity, they hang on to that to justify their own lazy indifference.  Similarly, there's a sort of head cop is in charge of the investigation and many times he begs his superiors for clemency for the two outlaw ladies.  Again, this doesn't ring true for me.  We're supposed to believe that these cops feel sympathy for these criminals?  My understanding is that cop-ing is very for-or-against.  The only sympathy is deployed as a means to capture.

But this isn't supposed to be a cop procedural or a documentary.  This is supposed to fill us with a sense that we too can break out of the dissatisfying lives we've trapped ourselves inside of, and that yes it will be scary and it will probably be a disaster, but it's still possible to try and it can be good.  It is an uplifting movie, even though we know it ends with that iconic plunge into the Grand Canyon.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

Saw Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019).  I really enjoyed it.  It was so swooning and sweet.  The film follows a lesbian love affair between a noblewoman who is about to be married off to some man she's never met and her portrait painter who is hired to give a little sneak peek of the noblewoman to her future husband (a reciprocal portrait of the husband for the future wife is never spoken of and probably would not be created).  At the start of the film, the painter is instructed to paint the portrait in secret however: the noblewoman doesn't want the wedding to happen and does not want the portrait to happen and so we have a scenario custom-built for mutual seduction: the artist must steal glances at the noblewoman's face, must memorize her features, must coax out blushes and smiles and long gazes into eyes.  Delicious!

The film introduces us to the portrait as a kind of doom.  It signals the transition from single girlhood to wife-hood and is not a portrait for her, but for her husband; a kind of advertisement for the bride-to-be, intended to please an anonymous man.  The characters reclaim the image of the noblewoman over the course of the film, not only by subverting the relationship with her future husband, but by involving the  noblewoman (the subject of the painting) in the creation of it.  It is no longer an advertisement but a statement.

The film also allows the noblewoman to reclaims her image by connecting it to the myth of Orpheus, specifically the moment when Orpheus turns to look at his dead wife, Euridice, dooming her to a second death.  Perhaps it was not weakness that made him look, the film suggests, perhaps he chose to keep the image, the memory of her instead of keeping Euridice herself.  "Perhaps it was Euridice who said to turn around." Suggests the noblewoman.

The film is so pretty, so gentle and nice.  Everyone is frank and friendly with each other.  There are no judgmental, scheming servants nor self-righteous priests or relatives or any of the usual avatars of conventional morality.  The central tragedy of the film is we viewers know that these two women who love each other so intensely cannot end up together.  They know this too and they must find a meaning for their love story which doesn't just leave it as a tragedy.  The film is so uplifting, even as it makes you cry.

Olympia (1938)

Saw Olympia (1938), a documentary of the 1936 Olympics shot by noted Nazi director Leni Riefenstahl.  It opens on Greek ruins and fades to shots of nude torsos of men and women flexing, throwing, lifting, pulling.  This film is interested in artistically tying the tradition of the Olympics back to its Greek roots.  As with Triumph of the Will, the Nazis wish to portray themselves as both vital and new and also as steeped in history and noble tradition.  This film walks that tightrope by evoking the body-worship of the ancient Greeks and by putting many strong German bodies on prominent display: both vital and traditional, you see.

Attractive humans are on great display here.  We get many shots of muscular men and lithe women jumping and diving and breaking world records.  Many of the film's most mesmerizing moments are shots of bodies.  The climactic end of the film shows men and women divers eternally jumping through the air, launching off of the diving board, their bodies taught, seeming to take flight into the sky reflected in the pool.  It's a magical sequence.

But this is also propaganda of course.  Along with sexy bodies we get to see several shots of a grinning Hitler convulsing with delight as Germany takes gold.  We have a shot of an army of outstretched Nazi salutes backing the sheepish face of an American who came in third.  We dig deep into the specialties of Germany and Italy: polo and field soccer and shooting and so on.  In fairness, we also get to see Jesse Owens break a world record, which is nice.

The film is quite long (220 minutes - nearly 4 hours!) but reasonably interesting in the way reality television is: you get caught up in the competition in spite of yourself.  The story of the competition is told from the German point of view (the commentary mourns a German loss and celebrates a German win) but I was able to grimly cheer when an Allied power won anyway.  The film is apparently one of those films that made great technical advances including point-of-view shots of the competition and a nice shot that follows some divers under-water.  This isn't quite enough to save the film for me however and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't a film and/or history enthusiast.  The opening and the closing might be worth a wider audience's time, but not much beyond that.

March of the Wooden Soldiers (1934)

Saw March of the Wooden Soldiers (1934), a mostly light-hearted slapstick film starring Laurel and Hardy.  The plot is silly and episodic.  Mostly it revolves around the evil Silas Barnaby scheming to marry Miss Bo Peep, despite the fact the Bo Peep is in love with Tom-Tom the piper's son.  Laurel and Hardy spend the film frustrating and ruining Silas's plans and generally failing at this, getting injured in some cartoon way in the process.

The film is very old and somewhat pokey.  It has a few sort of chapters which are not closely related to each other but which present new schemes of Silas's.  The film also has a very tame and almost cloying sensibility, with men in makeup and tights singing earnestly about running off to get married and live in a castle.  It's fairly quaint in a kind of dated way.  It comes off as a little slow to modern sensibilities.

It also comes off as sort of racist to modern sensibilities.  It's not over-the-top in the way that old war-time cartoon are, but it's a product of its time and its time was fairly racist.  Examples: The antagonist Silas Barnaby seems to be a miser and a money lender.  He is identified as a rat a few times which was an anti-semitic trope of the time.  He also seems to be in league(?) with the evil boogeymen who are dark-skinned, grass-skirt-wearing men who cavort and jump about but who are eventually subdued by the titanium-white-skinned wooden soldiers.  It's a little weird, but it's not the main focus of the film.  Mostly we see Laurel and Hardy joking around, but there's that element in it.

There's also a monkey in a Micky Mouse costume which is ghastly and extremely hilarious to my blackened heart.

Fellini's Casanova (1976)

Saw Fellini's Casanova (1976), a very fanciful take on the story of Casanova, notorious lover of women.  It starts with a bang, at the Venice carnival.  Like Moulin rouge or The Devils, this film is packed with super-fantastic re-imaginings of ancient Venice and Europe generally.  Soon after the opening, we see a woman in a row-boat on a sea which is transparently constructed out of trash bags.  We are then treated to a sex scene.

Donald Sutherland plays the titular Casanova.  He is played florid and flamboyant, like a stately drag queen.  The absurdity, it turns out is intentional.  There's something sad about this Casanova: many times he begs noblemen for a permanent position or for some modicum of respect, only to be sneered at and laughed at, to have pretty women thrown at him which he of course is distracted by.  He speaks of poetry and science, carries himself with great bearing, but the world only sees him as a horny goat, mechanically thrusting into the next conquest.

The film is on Casanova's side, but in a pitying way.  He's entranced by women but this is also his downfall: he cannot settle down with just one and this keeps him moving on and moving on until at last he's too old and worn down and dissipated to run anymore.  A pretty tragedy.

Alas, the film has a hefty dose of 1970s craziness.  There's many strange choices made.  In addition to the trash bad ocean, the sex scenes are also transparently fake.  Donald's buttocks flap up and down like he's doing pushups as the woman under him flaps her arms and legs, comically moaning "oh, oh!" It's not intended to be sexy (and isn't) and the absurdity, lack of sexiness only underscores how empty Casanova's life is, but it's not clear that that's what's happening and it's confusing and off-putting.  Similarly, the choice to feature Donald Sutherland with painted-on eyebrows and rouged lips, often clad in a corset and a flowery blouse.  It's all on purpose, but it's still frustrating and confusing.  An interesting film however.

Mad God (2021)

Saw Mad God (2021), a stop-motion film created by Phil Tippett, the special effects guy behind RoboCop and Tremors and Starship Troopers.  His signature ghastliness is on display, but alas with only visuals to share and no story, the film kind of drags incomprehensibly.

The plot is this more or less: we follow some guy exploring a grisly hell-scape populated by spindly dust bunnies.  The guy is carrying a suitcase to some place and seems to be well-prepared.  It's sort of hard to follow this story however.  At one point the guy is captured.  We then see a whole bunch of people in full-body casts in a hospital.  We zoom in on one of them.  Is that the first guy?  Does this hospital belong to the guys who captured him or has he been rescued now?  It doesn't matter and you will not know.

There's plenty of nice scenery however.  There's some plague doctor character who floats along eerily in a way that makes you wonder if this really is stop-motion or not.  A lot of the imagery is grim, of course, evoking the holocaust, medical horrors, and strange religious rites.  Alas, without some more obvious story for my brain to hang on to, I started falling asleep.  Interestingly, the film made somewhat more sense when I was half-awake.  Highly recommend!