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!