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!