Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Saw Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.  It was a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road.  That film I absolutely adored.  It was full of crazy, delightful, shocking excess.  This film is similar in that it's more of the same fun-house ride, but it's the same fun-house ride as before, so it feels a little less ground-breaking.  Don't get me wrong: this is not a bad film by any means, but it doesn't leave me with the same go-out-and-tell-everyone feeling the first film did.

The plot follows the story of Imperitor Furiosa before she joins Immortan Joe's gang.  Because this is a prequel, some of the conclusions are a little fore-gone.  Eg: we know she will wind up working for Immortan Joe.  The film keeps the action exciting enough that it sort of helps you to forget this, but we know always how the film will sort of wind up.  On that note: not to give spoilers, but the ending is pretty satisfying, a clever symbol of hope for tomorrow winning out over anger over the past.

I liked this film okay.  It wasn't as face-melting as the first film, but it's a solid showing.

The Blood of a Poet (1932)

Saw The Blood of a Poet, a surrealist film directed by Jean Cocteau.  Being a surrealist film, it's kind of hard to describe the plot or to determine what counts as a spoiler, but the premise anyway is that an artist wipes off the mouth of a charcoal sketch only to find that the mouth has somehow transferred to the palm of his hand.  Later on I think he turns into a statue.

The film completely lost me.  It has the creative process and artistry on its mind, but I was too tired and confused to guess at the meanings.  There's many moments where the artist becomes the art or the art comes to malevolent life, and I feel these are straightforward metaphors about creation and about "finishing" a piece (at which point it gains its own sort of "life".)  As I say however, the film contains a lot of stuff and I for sure did not understand it all.  It was fairly brief however, so I didn't have to baffled for too long.

Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)

Saw Bill & Ted Face the Music, a sequel to Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey which I unabashedly loved.  This film is similarly goofy and shaggy-dog, but I gotta admit I didn't like it quite so much as the Bogus Journey.

It's a very fun kind of film, jumping wildly from gag to gag in a way that never gets cloying or tedious but always seems somehow energetic and fresh in an 80s film kind of way.  There's a series of sequences where they visit versions of themselves in the future which are delightfully dumb.  Similarly, this film introduces Bill and Ted's daughters who are (of course) winningly doofy clones of their fathers.  The film is slightly precious but exudes so much good dude energy that I can't bring myself to be critical.

Here are some small gripes: they assemble a musical super-troupe by going backwards in time and recruiting Jimi Hendrix and Mozart and such.  This rang a little false to me because, like, Jimi Hendrix's music was a reaction to and a partial subversion of Mozart's work.  I don't think Mozart would have been delighted and impressed by hearing a subversive remix of his music, he would probably have just felt insulted, or distracted by the electric guitar.  Another thing: the introduction of the daughters (and their large roles in the film) suggests an open door for more sequels which makes the movie seem a tad  artificial, perhaps even corporate.  These are all pet peeves of mine however which I trot out just to have something to say.  Really this was a fun and sweet film.

So, this was a fun film.  I don't know that I'll be recommending it to folks full-throated-ly, but it was a nice capstone on the series.

There's Always Tomorrow (1956)

Saw There's Always Tomorrow, a domestic drama about a man who works at a toy factory.  The film opens on his plans for a romantic birthday dinner with his wife falling through as all of his kids take priority over his life.  He happens to meet an old acquaintance who is played by Barbara Stanwyck so, y'know, this is not just any random lady.  They dine and laugh and the woman showers the man with the attention his family denies him.

This is an interesting film because it was made in the 50s.  Societal expectations of the time cannot be flouted but also patriarchal figures cannot be mocked, so how are we going to deal with this burgeoning scandal?  I won't give the ending away, but it's handled decently.  There's a great showdown in the finale which, although it may not be super believable, is a great source of shouting and women crying and so forth (all of which feeds me.)

The characters all come off more-or-less okay.  The wife of the main character is necessarily very dismissive of any attempt at communication.  I get that this was necessary for the film's plot, but damn that lady is dumb.  When her husband talks about losing a sense of adventure together the wife primly says "Well, a life of adventure sounds very exhausting." and then she reminds him  to come inside and close the balcony door, dear.  Ugh, this lady.

Anyway, the film is fun but somewhat mild.  It has some nice Hitchcockian scenes, where the man and his old coworker laugh and talk, always being overheard at just the wrong moment.  There's some tension there but not a lot.  Similarly, a lot of the film is pretty twee, so we never get into really dark territory.  Similarly, since the film was made in the 50s, there's little chance of getting anything really transgressive (yo but what if they formed a throuple?)  This film is sort of the best of a series of compromises, a middling film that's pleasant but is sort of stopped from being really surprising or exciting.  Ah well.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

Saw Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, a fairly stirring film set in the Planet of the Apes universe.  In case you're somehow unaware, the franchise was kicked off by a Twilight Zone-esque film showing a group of astronauts crash land on a planet ruled by apes where humans are unintelligent livestock animals.  The big twist of the original film was that this is earth after all and that some calamity has occurred which wound us up in this upside-down world.  The prequels (which this film is one of) then work to fill in that gap: how did we get from here to there?

The prequel films have been attempted twice: once in the 70s and now in the 2010s.  They have a tricky central problem to solve: the apes are going up against long odds as they overcome humanity but we know, from the original, that they do it.  How can we start the apes off as an underclass without making their eventual transition to the over-class very troubling?  The original 70s films could not square this circle: they idiotically made the intelligent apes into analogues for black people (being shipped from Africa and employed as maids and all) implying that some kind of race war was coming where the "apes" would rise up and subjugate all us "humans".  Unsurprisingly, the films struggled to cohere.  The modern films have no such trouble.  They draw from the Fallout series of games and from other post-apocalyptic stories. How will a sympathetic and well-meaning pluralistic society wind up subjugating one of its sub-sets?  Why by arrogance, laziness, and greed - the same as today.

The film mostly follows ape society as it begins to crystallize into a feudal state.  It evokes Apocalypto in parts, showing tribal communities being subjugated by a more complex, but also more stratified culture.  It's interesting to see these historical dramas play out, but the film is more interested in how to negotiate sympathy between humans and apes.  Humans are still around and apes are not certain about how to deal with them.  They are capable of great and useful things, but they are also hungry for power themselves.  Can we create a pluralistic society?  The question looms large over our real lives as well.  There's no red/blue analogues, but we are divided, and the players in the different camps regard each other with wary suspicion.

So okay, but did I like it?  Well, the film is solidly alright.  It has the gaudy, CGI-soaked feel of one James Cameron's Avatar films or of the Marvel franchise.  There's pages and pages of IMDB trivia devoted to the novel use of AI in the film's special effects.  You're not going to be very challenged by the film, even as it deals with some interesting topics.  It's an entertaining and pretty film and the emphasis is on those two items: prettiness and entertainment.  It's not bad, but it didn't blow me away.  It's a sort of by-the-numbers big box-office epic.  A sequel is planned, naturally, as there is always more of this story to tell: it has no firm point, so it can go on forever.

I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Saw I Walked with a Zombie, a sort of quaint film about a nurse who comes to work at a small island in Haiti or somewhere where they follow voodoo.  The nurse is supposed to care for the wife of one of the guys who runs the sugar cane plantation on the island.  This wife was once normal but is now shambling and vacant, almost (dare I say) zombie-like.  I didn't realize it, but the film is basically Wuthering Heights.  One of the characters even calls the Heathcliff character Byronic.

Anyway, the setting of the film gives it strong racial/colonial overtones.  I was convinced half-way through that the wife was meant to stand in for the decaying western values transplanted and enforced by the colonial settlers.  Like the wife, a once vivacious force is reduced to sleepwalking along, vacant and useless but venerated by the local rulers.  There's a late-film revelation that implies a more murky interplay with the locals.

Alas, the film doesn't really go in that direction, at least not explicitly.  Instead it's a somewhat more conventional horror film, with stalking black men menacing the main characters.  It's fairly lurid and is pretty entertaining, but also somewhat racist in what I feel is a strident and indifferent way.  In one early exchange a black man is driving the nurse to the manor house.  He speaks of his family being brought to this island in slave galleys. "Well it's certainly a beautiful place they were brought to!" the nurse smilingly says.  "As you say ma'am." the driver responds. "As you say." because what else can you really say to that?

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Saw I Saw the TV Glow, a film about a boy becoming obsessed with a young-adult TV show called The Pink Opaque.  The film is a sort of psychodrama/horror film, about losing oneself, but not in the way you'd think.

The film is most focused on the harmful and helpful parts of fandom.  On the one hand, the TV show gives this boy an escape from his difficult home life, friends, a sense of purpose and belonging, but the film also suggests that this all-consuming obsession may lead to increasingly insular beliefs and ideas about the world, ultimately even sucking the joy out of real life.

The plot of the film makes it seem like Beware the Slenderman, a story about a teenager who falls too deeply into a fictional world, but the fictional TV show within the film is clearly based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other such supernatural-themed teen shows, which have large real-life followings.  Not everyone who watched Buffy became unhealthily obsessed, many found role models that gave them a voice and a way of carrying themselves, a way to command respect when they felt least respected.  Particularly for folks who didn't perfectly fit it: gay men and women, struggling with their place in the world.

The director of this film is queer and I cannot help feeling that their life journey is a strong inspiration of this film.  It helps explain why the central TV show is given such a fair shake: yes this is an all-consuming fantasy, but sometimes you need to start with fantasy to get to reality.  I don't want to be reductive though: the film is not only about gender expression, but about the central struggle of going along and fitting in with the world vs going your own direction, following a lesser-traveled path, even at the cost of your own safety, comfort, and even life.

The film is a slow creep.  It feels more like a coming-of-age film than a horror film.  There's no jump scares, but there is the creeping realization that something deeper and stranger is going on.  The film plays with our expectations and also gives us lots of glorious, creepy imagery.  Special mention: that scene where the main character's father pushes him under the shower.  The main character screams, the soundtrack distorts, and the water is suddenly animated with ugly colored pencils before a smash cut to black.  Splendid!

L.A. Confidential (1997)

Saw L.A. Confidential (1997), a modern noir film with three major protagonists.  The main protagonist is this self-righteous boy-scout of a cop who is determined to do everything by the book.  He opens the film being denied a position in the homicide squad because of his unwillingness to bend the law to get results.  This conflict of justice vs vigilantism becomes the central preoccupation of the film.  As I said: it's a noir film.

The film was alright.  I was able to follow the plot okay which is always nice in a noir.  Sometimes they get so knotty that I completely lose track of who the characters are talking about.  Not so here - it was usually easy to keep track of what the characters know.  I did have a sneaking suspicion that I'd seen this movie before though, so that may be why.

Anyway, the film also spends a lot of time creating and exploding cover stories as different characters try to clear their names.  It made me think of post-modernism, where the narrative is considered to be more important than the reality of a situation.  In these modern times when objective truth is becoming more and more murky, perhaps we're due for a resurgence in noirs?

Anyway, I'm not that interested in the central theme of the film (playing by the rules vs taking the law into one's own hands) and this film did not succeed in hooking me on it either.  It did a good job of keeping me entertained and guessing as the film unfolded however.  It was a decent film.

Until the End of the World (1991)

Saw Until the End of the World, an extremely long film by Wim Wenders.  Clocking in at 4 hours and 45 minutes, the film is sort of three small films put together.  The three films are these:

1. A woman falls in love with a man by chance encounter.  He is on the run and she follows him across the globe, country to country, trying to understand him and to save him.

2. A nuclear powered satellite loses control and is hurtling somewhere towards earth.  Society reacts with terror and panic at this calamity.

2. A scientist develops a way to record and transmit dreams from one person to another.

Each of these films are interesting in their own right.  Apparently the first one is a sort of inverted Odyssey, where Penelope becomes tired of waiting for Odysseus and goes out to find him herself.  It's an interesting feminist twist on the Odyssey story and worth digging into.  There's that theme of obsession and desire that films are so good at exploring.

The second film could be made into a compelling action film.  There are interesting thoughts to be had about mankind's relationship to its own continued survival and mankind's relationship with its own weapons of war.  I don't want to spoil this film too much, but there's potential for ruminations on the end of the world and the sort of legacy humans will leave too.

The third film I found the most interesting.  There's some thoughts there about how technology both empowers and hobbles us, enabling us to things we could do before, but also limiting us in some ways.  (eg: we now have cameras to do what oil paints used to, but now we need photoshop or smoothing filters to hide our flaws.) That's a whole topic unto itself.

Alas, this is not three small films but one big one.  The same characters are improbably involved in all three acts and, to be fair, there is some foreshadowing and theming to tie these things all together.  Apparently there was going to be a fourth act that also tied in to the frequent references to aboriginal ceremonies.

To add to this, it's directed by Wim Wenders whose films have never really been about the destination.  Instead, his films amble along, enjoying the car ride and listening to some laid-back tunes.  I feel like Wenders's work would really work best in a period piece.  The slow contemplation would be more palatable to me if it were set in the 40s, where life was lived more slowly.  Perversely however, this film is set in the future (ie: 1999).  This is a slightly retro future however.  There are public pay phones, but they are now video pay phones.  Cars no longer play CDs, but they do use some kind of plastic card to play music instead.  It's a strange choice that I think was only made for plot-fudging reasons.

So this film was not the greatest.  It tackles many things.  It does not feel rushed thankfully, but that is due to its length which is oppressive.  The film feels like a long book or a heady dinner conversation that discursively stretches on, wandering through many themes.  It's relatively interesting and intelligent, but oof I wish there were an intermission.  Usually, I want to watch a quick movie before bed, not start a marathon!  That is why this movie sat on my queue for so long.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

Saw The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, a film by Werner Herzog about a feral man who appears in a village one day with no sign of where he came from or who had been taking care of him.  As a film about a feral person, it cannot help but also be about people living on the fringes of society.  Kaspar cannot navigate this world, needs people, but also lacks people.  He must rely on the largesse of the state and on charity.  It is kind of comforting to see that even with so many disadvantages (or perhaps due to them) he is still able to find some kind of place in this world.

The appeal of the story to Herzog, I think, comes from the fact that Kaspar does not seem to really want to be saved.  He spent the beginning of his life in a cellar and, after being freed, expressed a longing to return to the cellar.  He says that he is most happy in bed, and his various forays into the wider public are always hassle-filled, humiliating trials.  Perhaps he has too much isolation within him already, perhaps this society is not suitable for him anymore.

The film follows Kaspar very closely.  We are not really told what's happening to him, we just see that now he seems to be living in this place, now that place.  The film moves along nicely and has some fairly funny scenes where policemen and doctors officially react to Kaspar.  It didn't fully grab me, but that's probably my fault.  I dunno.

Summer Wars (2009)

Saw Summer Wars, an exciting anime about a boy caught up in events beyond his control.  He is recruited by his high-school crush to pretend to be her fiancé when she visits her wealthy grandmother.  Simultaneously, he solves what he believes to be a brain teaser and becomes accidentally involved in the destruction of OZ, a futuristic metaverse-style pseudo-internet which is deeply integrated into the real world.

The film is fairly straightforward.  The boy is a fish out of water among the sprawling and loud family he's been dumped into.  A fair amount of the movie is just him reacting to the rambunctious kids or the brash men or whatever.  The OZ stuff is not super realistic, but it's more cinema-friendly depictions of avatars punching each other or struggling to open doors etc.  It's nonsense, but it's relatable nonsense.  Also, having actually been part of fairly serious tech outages in the past, I can tell you that that's how it feels, even if we're just watching little scripts run.

This film depicts tech and the internet generally as being another universe where other rules apply.  It was made in 2009, but even by that point I think it was becoming clear that the internet is just people.  There are no new rules, just mobs of people and companies.  This film recognizes this and centers most of the action around real people in the real world.  There is a theme, for example, of misbehaving bastard offspring.

The film is cute and silly however.  It's somewhat over-cute (the ending bits especially made me squirm with sugar overload) but the action is thrilling and it does a good job of topping itself, always coming up with some yet-more stunt for the family to get involved in.  The emotions are big and bold and the art is beautiful (the sun coming up over the mountains!  Muah!)  It's a fun movie.

Poor Things (2023)

Saw Poor Things, a fable-like reimagination of the story of Frankenstein.  It follows Bella, a woman brought back from the dead with the mind of a child.  From there, she is adopted by various men who try to make her in their image: a doctor who makes her into a biological experiment, a lothario who tries to make her into a lover, a cynic who tries to give her a cynical view.  All of these men's actions are  deliciously subverted and frustrated by her simple certainty and ghastly nonconformity.  It's great fun to watch.

The film is extremely gaudy, venturing into George Miller-ish excesses and Wes Anderson-ian artificiality.  At one point they're in a ship and Bella looks at the sky which has the northern lights, a ton of stars, a bank of storm clouds, and a sunset going on all at once.  Similarly, the doctor's house is occupied by strange semi-erotic statues and half-goat/half-duck hybrids.  Even outside of the doctor's house we see carriages which are both horse-drawn and also steam powered.  It's very silly, but it's not really supposed to be comical.  In the style of fairytales and fantasy it's fabulous but not frivolous.  The story is held together by the motivations of Bella which are always childishly clear.  She frankly states what she wants throughout the movie.

Watching her navigate all of these men who seek to control her is very satisfying.  I particularly liked her takedown of the cynic (who, to be fair, takes it with good grace.)  The film has a lot of great moments and, as Bella learns to navigate the world, becomes more hopeful over time.  She has a lot going against her, but her confidence is magnetic.  After all she has already died once.  What more can happen to her?

Spring in a Small Town (1948)

Saw Spring in a Small Town, a quiet but intense melodrama about a woman who is married to a sickly man.  You can see trouble brewing as soon as a visitor comes to their small household: a good friend of the husband and the childhood sweetheart of the wife.  The wife and the visitor care for the sickly husband and begin the long slow process of circling around each other, unwilling to hurt each other, but both still longing for the other.  It's forbidden love, 1940s style!

The film is somewhat mannered.  No more than contemporary American films, but differently.  There's scenes where the characters dramatically pose before launching into some dramatic act.  Curiously, there's not a lot of monologues.  The central woman does a lot of acting by way of little pauses, her downturned gaze bespeaking an intense inner struggle.  There's a lot of pregnant pauses and unspoken feelings.  The result is that the feelings can be as intense as we understand them to be.  Well done.

The film is somewhat pokey however.  I admit I wasn't in the mood for a family melodrama, so this film didn't really hit the spot, but I could tell even so that this is a well-made film.  It seems to celebrate self-sacrifice which feels troublesome and uncomfortable.  You shouldn't be too self-centered of course, but staying in what seems to be a loveless marriage, just out of a sense of duty?  It feels like it's asking too much.  The past was a different time.

The film is good.  It's a little old, but brief for all that.  It's an interesting, small, quietly big film.

The Boy and the Heron (2023)

Saw The Boy and the Heron, a typically masterful film from Studio Ghibli.  This one reminded me a lot of Howl's Moving Castle, another film that hearkens back to arcadian idylls, full of vast monuments, intricate passages, and malevolent danger. The film doesn't directly steal from anything, but echoes MC Escher, the grotesques of Felix Colgrave and Jan Švankmajer.  The film is so touching and grand.

The opening of the film gives Pixar's Up a run for the fastest a film can break your heart: we open on the main character's memories of his mother dying in a fire.  This haunts him and he becomes a stern, serious little boy who is always ready to do the right thing, ready to pull the next victim from a fire.  The film is set against the backdrop of a burgeoning WW2, when the whole world was bracing itself, steeling itself; preparing itself to make the great self-sacrifice.  This rigidity is the boy's strength and his weakness.  He is ready to do battle with magical forces, but he cannot bring himself to face his classmates.

The film is packed with wonderful whimsey.  There's a gang of seven old women who look like wrinkled little frogs and who gleefully cackle over potted meat.  In addition to the titular heron, there are lots of birds, some sinister, some pathetic.  There are many set-pieces with the gorgeous intricacy of the bathhouse from Spirited Away or the club house from From Up on Poppy Hill. This is a world I would love to live in, even as the characters shout cryptic warnings about waking the dead.

I loved this film.  It opened with an almost palpable sense of doom: the little boy, newly traumatized by the death of his mother seems to be thrust in a new situation and engaged in self-destruction.  Indeed, about a fourth of the way through, I thought I was going to write that this is the closest Miyazaki has come to a horror movie.  But soon after that, the film deepens, and opens, and lifts, and it gets slowly better.  Just a lovely film.

Winter Light (1963)

Saw Winter Light, an Ingmar Bergman film about a priest who is having a crisis of faith.  We open on a celebration of the mass in front of a nearly empty church.  The organist yawns as he starts the music.  The priest has no emotion in his voice and has the flu.  The film is subtle and ambiguous.  Famously, Ingmar's wife said of this film "Yes, Ingmar, it's a masterpiece. But it's a dreary masterpiece."

The nature of the priest's crisis of faith is the central point of the film.  I felt that the only way to satisfyingly end the film was for the priest to recover his faith (happy ending!) or to reject it in some way (stupid ending!) The film leaves it nicely ambiguous right up to the end though.  The priest's plight is likened to Jesus in the garden of gethsemane, praying while his apostles slept and ignored him.  As opposed to that image, this priest is merely letting himself down: he has a faithful woman who loves him, his advice is sought by the congregation, he does not seem to be being abandoned.

Despite this lack of abandonment however, the priest finds it hard to have faith in his God, his mission, and himself.  This doubt leads to guilt leads to self-loathing which prevents him from being of use and prevents him from receiving help.  We sort of leave him there - still acting out the lingering fumes of an exhausted faith.  The ending is deliciously ambiguous though: is this the dying gasp or the reclamation I hoped for (the happy ending?) It's a nice little study of a film, a stark yet ambiguous look at a man in crisis.

Consuming Spirits (2012)

Saw Consuming Spirits, a somewhat grim animated film about three people living in some dreary Appalachian town.  It features the usual elements of a cramped, small-town drama: addiction, mental health issues, divorce and infidelity.  Everyone in the film is ugly and advertisements play on the radio for "institution-grade" meat products.  Yes, this is one of those universes where things kind of comically suck.  Despite the grim and confusion start however, the film coheres into a touching, almost comforting story.

The film is very sad.  The characters are hopeless, stuck in this town in jobs which they are failing at and in romances that are continuing more out of inertia and faith than out of any affection.  The title of the film does a lot of nice work laying the thematic background: "Consuming Spirits" can be read as either ghosts which devour or just plain old drinking beer.  These two interpretations are tied together by the legacy of alcoholism that haunts the characters.

The film has the rough, unfinished look of a work print.  Some scenes are animated in Southpark-style paper puppets, some are stop-motion miniatures, some are traditional drawings.  Adding to this loose, raw feeling is the narration which is provided by the host of a radio gardening show who waxes poetical about vegetables and pests, weeds and deer.  At one point he says of deer "A rutting deer may lose the fear of man altogether when unsated.  Beware these cloven messengers of the hybrid knowledge.  They are the keepers of my crypt!"  Believe it or not, this statement makes more sense after you know the full story.  It's not just wild set-dressing (I mean it is that, but not just that.)

The film is interesting.  It's fairly dismal, reminding me of Phil Mulloy's Cowboys shorts.  The animation is off-putting and the subject matter is challenging.  The film feels long and it drags a bit here and there, but it wraps together nicely and is much more coherent and cohesive than you'd expect.

The Wild Child (1970)

Saw The Wild Child, a film about a feral boy who is slowly brought into the machinery of normal society.  It was interesting.  It was based on the nonfiction case report of the doctor who was treating the feral boy.  It's interesting seeing this kid slowly adopt clothing, learn to ask for things, slowly crawl out of the hole they were left in as a child living in the wild, exposed to the elements.

I don't have any particular thoughts about this movie.  It's pleasant, admittedly in a sort of severe, dry, French kind of way, but it is pleasant and uplifting to see the boy's progress.  I suppose there's a parallel to be drawn here between our own innate desires vs society: how people are willing to be indulgent, but only for so far and for so long.  Eventually, you will have to behave.  Rather than this being a dower story of innate nature crushed, this is an uplifting story about reaching potential.

I enjoyed the movie but don't have a lot to say about it.

The Death of Stalin (2017)

Saw The Death of Stalin, a film which is a comedy, in spite of its title and subject matter.  Indeed, the plot follows the pant-shitting panic of the heads of the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of Stalin's death.  I enjoyed it a lot.

The film contains a strange mix of tragedy and comedy.  There's an element of whimsy in the fact that an insurgent's note wishing death upon Stalin is the actual cause of his death, but there's an element of realism in that Stalin, reading the note, chuckles to himself and later on that it's stuffed into the pocket of one of the other bureaucrats with an indifferent grunt.  These men are realists pretending to be idealists, their power magnifying their smallness.

The film is pretty funny though.  In the spirit of In The Loop and other political dramas, it mostly centers around petty squabbles, men in suits jockeying for power, overreacting, stuttering, dithering, frantically browbeating each other into going along with their plans which lead nowhere.  There's a lot of humor to be had from these dower grey men just standing in sumptuous halls of power and being catty bitches to each other.

From what I've heard, the film was fairly accurate to life as well.  Of course liberties were taken for the sake of comedy, but Lavrentiy Beriya apparently really was like that.  Likewise Khrushchev.  Michael Palin plays a hilariously intense Molotov and Jeffrey Tambor plays a wonderfully limp stand-in Stalin.  There's an element of grimness, but a fair amount of silliness too.  It's as though The Lives of Others was made as a comedy.

Antonio das Mortes (1969)

Saw Antonio das Mortes, the sequel to Black God, White Devil.  This film follows a bounty hunter,  Antonio, who comes out of retirement to kill his last bandit, the legendary Lampião (a real person in Brazilian history.)  In the opening text crawl we are told that Antonio is similar to St George who slew a dragon.  We are told up-front that Antonio is going to kill the dragon of evil.  Lampião then would seem to be this dragon, but when Antonio confronts Lampião, Lampião reminds him that he is merely the lap-dog of the landlords and the bourgeoise.  It is they who are the dragon and Antonio is their servant.

The film indulges in a lot of 1960s art-house stuff.  We get slow pans and grimy film-stock.  Scenes of crowds chanting or men fighting seem to stretch on forever, reels of film unspooling while nothing happens.  We are given plenty of time to sit and meditate over the film, but I could have done with something a little punchier (such is my weakness.)

There's an interesting use of seeming anachronism.  When we first see Lampião, he seems to be surrounded by a mob of medieval peasants.  We see men in button-up shirts wandering around however and realize that this is some kind of performance or festival or something.  The effect is sort of like watching a parade: somehow both tawdry and grand at the same time.  Our St George stand-in, Antonio, looks somewhat medieval as well, standing in his thick wool cloak, his machete sheathed by his hip.  You can imagine him as a knight, conversing with the bar maid.

I remember seeing an interview with Terry Gilliam where he described how much he admired Antonio Fellini until he went to Italy himself.  He had thought that Fellini had such a wonderful imagination until he discovered that no, Italy is just like that.  This film reminds me of the work of Jodorowsky: strange and obscure, but I also got the feeling that, like Italy, Brazil is just like that in some way.  A strange film.

Inherent Vice (2014)

Saw Inherent Vice, an adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name which I just finished reading.  The film was directed by P T Anderson and seems like an examination of the tail end of 60s counter-culture.  There are hippies and G-men and Nixon and talk of the Manson family murders, but there are also murders by speedball and paid informants infiltrating communes.  Paranoia and confusion seem to be the mood, more than love and peace.

The plot of the film is laid out as a mystery, with the main character being a bleary-eyed drugged up private eye, competently and ably chasing down leads and finding out information, but somehow the information never gels.  It just leads to deeper mysteries, connections are made that don't explain anything.  The film is almost perverse in the number of plots that build up and intertwine.  This is not a film for folks who like neat conclusions.  There are none here.

This film seems to be more interested in the various characters and their reaction to the mounting confusion they find themselves in.  There's serene hippy chicks, but there's also increasingly unhinged cops and FBI agents.  At one point a character seethes at the thought of his daughter having sex with one of the other characters.  He's not seething about the sex really though, but about the tacky décor of the hotel rooms they'd use for their trysts.  Weird.

Anyway, this was an okay film.  I preferred P T's other films better: There Will be Blood and Punch-Drunk Love.  This one was very knotty however, which I think is the point, and is satisfyingly ambiguous in its action.  It was okay.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)

Saw Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a film that was supposed to be a sequel to The Valley of the Dolls (1967) (which I have not seen) however the production apparently lost the rights to The Valley of the Dolls or something and now this film (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) opens with a text blurb explaining that this is specifically not a sequel to The Valley of the Dolls and the fact that the characters are all the same is a complete coincidence!!  What a mess.

The background story to this film nicely tees up what a confusing, ramshackle adventure this film is.  It follows a trio of girls in a rock band and their manager, the lead singer's boyfriend, as they travel to Los Angeles to try to make it in Hollywood.  They are instantly swept up into a milieu of lawyers, pornographers, homosexuals, and druggies.  They ping-pong around in brightly-lit and overly decorated apartments, sleeping with each other, smoking weed, and shouting "Far out!" at the drop of a hat.  The film is shot like an inconsequential sex comedy.  But then the ending happens.

The ending of the film elevates this from being a merely forgettable piece of bad art into a stupendous, baffling, monument of bad art!  It changes from being a somewhat raunchy take on Josie and the Pussy Cats to something out of the depths of Gallo Cinema, like Dario Argento took over the film for a few reels.  It's just bananas!  The ending is such a radical gear-shift that the opening credits open on it.  It's the hook that'll keep you watching.  Just nuts!  And the script was written by Roger Ebert!

Apparently on release this film was panned.  It was clearly ahead of its time.  It walked so that other self-aware camp, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show could run.  This is not a film full of poignant drama or deep thoughts.  This is a film where British accents appear and disappear, where parties are hosted by loquacious bisexuals, where old women in fright-wigs say things like "I'd sure like to strap you on!" to the pretty-boy protagonist.  It's mad and strange and stupid and great.  I enjoyed it, and I wish I had been drunk or high with friends when I saw it.

Patema Inverted (2013)

Saw Patema Inverted, a fun and cute anime with the following premise: due to some unspecified scientific experiment, a large amount of physical material (including people) accidentally had their gravity reversed, sending them all flying into the sky.  Centuries later, the remnants of the upside-down people live in a maze-like warren of underground bunkers while the right-side-up folks live on the earth's surface.  The right-side-uppers have deemed the upside-downers to be sinful.  The protagonists are a girl from the upside-down-iverse and a boy from the land of right-side-up.  It's all a little obvious.

So, the rank intolerance of the upside-down/right-side-up feud clearly evokes many differences in the real world.  When the boy and girl first meet, they have a brief argument about which one of them is upside down.  Later, in imposing 1984-style education facilities, the children are taught that upside-downers are immoral, suggesting a parallel with sexuality or to religious intolerance.  One of the leaders talks about how terrible it would be if their blood were to mingle, referencing rhetoric about racial divisions.  It's a broad gesture and encompasses many things.

The film is very cute and fun.  The two kids hug onto each other frequently in order to descend or ascend huge drops.  I'm not sure that the physics is quite right, but maybe.  It does result in them creating a visual metaphor for the theme of the film: that we need to come together and bridge our differences, that opposites can be synergistic rather than antagonistic.

The film is also stealing liberally from early Ghibli films.  The characters are sweet and curious, courageous in a sort of cat-like way, and live in sumptuously detailed surroundings.  It's a good thing to steal from!  The film is relatively slight but very sweet and touching.  I enjoyed it!

The Circus (1928)

Saw The Circus, a Charlie Chaplin film wherein his little tramp character gets sucked into a circus.  This is a little tricky to juggle as the premise of a comedy film because people like to root for the underdog, the screwup, but if he's going to be funny, surely he'll be a success in the circus, and thus not the underdog, no?  So the film has to keep him ground down and spinning around, being funny in spite of the cruel ringmaster who is, of course, the despotic father of the young ingénue.

Despite the tricky premise, the film is the usual Chaplin drollery.  He interacts with policemen.  He does daredevil stunts.  He endlessly spoils a magician's magic tricks.  You will be unsurprised by anything going on on the screen.

From the imdb trivia, the story behind the camera was far more interesting.  Apparently Chaplin was going through a divorce with his child bride, an IRS audit, and his mother's death all at the same time while trying to make a film.  What a nightmare!  I'd be curious to see a documentary about that!

Sorry to Bother You (2018)

Saw Sorry to Bother You, a deliciously absurd political comedy about a guy, Cash, who is trying to make it big in the world.  The film involves unionizing and riots, code switching and selling out.  It feels very of the moment for these tumultuous times.  It's a comedy, so things are kept relatively light and zany, but the bones of the film are pretty serious.

On top of this, the film has a chunky, lo-fi special effects aesthetic.  At one point Cash is doing well and transforming his life.  His cheap cruddy furniture splits into pieces and flies away revealing classier lamps, a big-screen TV unfolding from the shell of his small one.  In another scene, he's in an office building.  You can see some guys in the background struggling with a broken copy machine.  As the scene progresses, the copy machine gets more and more broken until it's just spewing papers into the air like a blizzard.  None of this is acknowledged or foregrounded.  Delightful!

I liked the film!  It produced a ton of crazy imagery and was pretty funny throughout, without dipping into too much cruelty.  My one gripe is that the ending feels a little false.  The film is so grim in its humor that I felt sort of surprised that the film was as upbeat as it finally was.  This is a minor thing though. I guess I wanted a sad ending to soothe my black heart!

Que Viva Mexico (1979)

Saw Que Viva Mexico.  This was an attempt by Aleksandrov to finish an unfinished film that Eisenstein was making about the Mexican revolution.  He was unable to complete it due to budgetary constraints and Stalin running out of patience.  I'm sort of annoyed at my movie list that recommended this film however.  It lists this film as having been released in 1932, indicating that it's in fact recommending the original, unfinished, partially lost Eisenstein film!  How am I supposed to lay my eyes on that?

Anyway, this film was a typically gorgeous Eisenstein film where characters with strong motivations, strong jaws, but zero personalities act out the beginnings of the revolution.  It cleverly ties geography to history, moving out of the jungles into the deserts and north, towards towns which are more civilized, but where class struggle is more readily apparent.

Apparently Eisenstein was inspired to shoot the film this way by seeing the great variety of lifestyles and architecture readily available in Mexico.  You can see how right he was: there are stone fortresses, cactus forests, jungles, and those strange agave plants, so huge and alien.  The film is very pretty and contains a lot of striking visuals: a man's face looming over a Mayan pyramid, a man with a gun silhouetted against a door frame.  Eisenstein has a great eye for conveying information and drama purely symbolically.  As I kind of mentioned earlier, he's not the best at creating interpersonal melodrama (of which I am greatly fond) but he's good at creating sweeping historical, political dramas, which made him the ideal director for Communist Russia.

Worth a look!

Beau is Afraid (2023)

Saw Beau is Afrai, a film directed by Ari Aster, of Midsommar and Hereditary fame.  I enjoyed those films a lot, however this one is more inscrutable to me - it's both mostly clear what's going on but is far more confusing as to why, in a broad sense, this is all happening.

The film is billed as a horror/comedy.  I'm generally apt to see the sad things in life, so often in comedies I feel bad for the poor bumbling characters who are being harassed for our amusement.  Likewise in horror, the essentially unpleasant thing in the horror film is often something very prosaic and accessible: loss of a loved one, loss of control over your own life, fear of death, etc.  This film gets its horror from taking normal, unpleasant circumstances and amping them to 11.  Not only have you lost your keys to your apartment, but they have been stolen right out of your keyhole.  Not only that, but this will make you late for a flight to visit your mother who clearly does not believe your story.  Not only that but you live on a street which is packed so full of violent addicts that you have to sprint to your door ahead of them every night. etc etc.  It's very Synecdoche, New York.

I guess from the genre description that it's supposed to be funny and there are indeed a few scenes I laughed at (the main character has his computer monitor destroyed.  He finds it with a shoe bashed through the screen.  He gamely plugs the monitor in and navigates around the shoe.) but there were precious few such moments.  There's a whole set of jokes around the main character's balls that seem incongruous and strange.  Usually, the misery just piles on so hard and so high that I get the sense that you're really supposed to laugh here, but it's all so real and so serious that I find it hard to laugh at so easily.  I mostly just felt bad for the poor main character.  It felt more triggering than silly to me.

The main character has an anxiety problem which leaves him uncertain and quivering through most scenes, uncertain of what to do.  Rather than receiving any sympathy, everyone treats him with suspicion and hostility, either insulting him and blaming him for accidents beyond his control or seizing control over his life and making decisions for him.  We discover that he is entirely dependent on his family and has lead a shadow-life, always cringing from the world.  This supposed to be ridiculous.

One thing I really liked about both Midsommar and Hereditary is that they took fear and horror seriously: being startled by a bang or grossed out by a corpse or a monster or something is not actually that bad.  Corpses can't actually hurt you.  What hurts you is your love for the person that that corpse used to be; the knowledge that one day that corpse will be you.  That's the real thing we feel revulsion for.  Cheap horror focuses on the revulsion, but good horror gets you to feel the loss, the pathos of injury.  I think that in making this film into a comedy, it looses that thing behind the thing - the emotions that make life hard to bear.

I certainly enjoyed watching this film.  It provided a veritable cornucopia of intertwining themes and had strange visuals galore.  I didn't find it scary or funny however, and I suspect this is because Ari Aster and I have wildly different senses of humor.

Cat People (1942)

Saw the original version of Cat People, the one from 1942.  It follows a man who falls quickly in love with some Serbian woman who comes from a small village which is rumored to harbor "cat people" who are cursed to transform into carnivorous cats when they fall in love.  The man assumes his girlfriend is crazy and tries to get her help but, predictably, this is of no avail.

I liked the film!  It's a slow-burn psychodrama, as the girlfriend becomes slowly more menacing.  There's no transformation sequence, but there's a great animated dream interlude involving malevolently loping cats.  There's also a lot of ominous dread mined from the characters simply being freaked out.  We don't need to see the panther to be frightened.  We only need to see the character we care about becoming panicked.

On top of this classy restrained creepiness, there's the rich symbolism of the cat transformation.  It's something that happens after the marriage is consummated, and it originates from a far-off, old land.  The girlfriend fears reverting to some primitive, monstrous state.  It could so easily be read as a metaphor for anxieties around sexual desire, or as an immigrant's shame of their country of origin.  There's a scene where a cat-like lady hostilely greets the girlfriend as a "sister." The girlfriend gasps and turns pale, but refuses to explain.  It's explicitly about being a cat-person, but it could be, implicitly, about many things.  Very good!

The film is old and a little pokey and black and white and some of the acting is a little wacky.  There's nothing too terrible (no blackface!) but it's an old movie, just be aware.  If you can stomach that, then take a look, this is a surprisingly good film!

Don't Worry Darling (2022)

Saw Don't Worry Darling, a film that's got twists and turns so it's a little hard to talk about but the premise is basically this: we follow Alice who is the Barbie-doll, 1960s wife of a suit-and-tie-wearing 1960s businessman.  She lives in a plastic-fantastic housing development where they laze around all day drinking martinis and gossiping.  But it's very clear even from the outset that this is not actually the 1960s.  The characters playfully flip each other off and act in anachronistically casual ways, the wives all go ballet practice where the camera prowls and creeps along, watching the graceful women in their identical leotards, clearly signaling that we are in Stepford Wife territory.

I enjoyed this film okay.  It had a good sense of creeping wrong-ness.  I do wish it had been a little more subtle though.  There's a scene early on where the main character is vacuuming the carpet while that Spooky Scary Skeletons cartoon plays on the TV.  That's good: it's subtle.  The picture-perfect 60s atmosphere is troubled by this Halloween cartoon, subtly mocking the ballet lesson.  It's small, but it's still early in the film.  We're building.  Soon after that however there's a scene where the main character is making eggs and realizes to her confusion that the eggs she bought are all just hollow shells with nothing inside.  This is less good in my opinion.  It's still early in the film.  We shouldn't be breaking reality just yet, should we?  Ah well.

Despite not being the slowest of boils, we spend a lot of time with the protagonist, being unsure what's going on, trying to figure it out.  When the explanation comes, it's still a little confusing, but more or less satisfying and there's some interesting inclusion of some internet sub-culture stuff, but the heart of the film is watching this pretty lady be horrified and confused in a sumptuous, midcentury-modern setting.

It's not the best film, but it entertained me okay.  It reminded me of Vivarium (and of course of The Stepford Wives.)  It's very stylish and clever in parts.  It's a little clumsy in parts too, but we can't have everything.

On the Town (1949)

Saw On the Town, a goofy little musical number about three sailors (Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and someone called Jules Munshin) who get one precious day to experience New York city.  They meet girls, they get chased by cops, they sing that New York New York song.  It's a whole thing.

Generally this movie was a miss for me.  It's very precious and very sweet.  There's some risqué humor, but nothing that wouldn't fly in a high school production.  No one's motivations make a ton of sense beyond them just being in love I guess, but the point of the movie of course is to be a big frivolous musical.  I'm not a big fan of musicals I gotta say, and this one left me a little cold.

Here's what I liked: the dance sequences were lovely.  There's a An American In Paris-style bravura number that recaps the entire film to that point which is beautiful, really some of Gene Kelly's best work.  I always start a Gene Kelly movie being indifferent to his smirks and grins but I always fall in love with him again by the end.  Apparently a tyrannical perfectionist to work with, but he dances a pretty dance.

So anyway, not a winner for me.  It's a little too old and tame.  It has aged a bit, and there are sequences where they dress up as primitive tribespeople which I don't think is offensive to any particular group but felt very cringey to me.  There's some cleverness and a ton of athleticism, but not enough hysterics or visuals for me to really enjoy.  Oh well, here's to the next one!

Flatliners (1990)

Saw the 1990s version of Flatliners.  It was very interesting.  It follows five medical students who hatch a plan to induce death for a brief period before resuscitating themselves to bring back knowledge of the hereafter.  It's a strange combination of gaudy and fascinating.  It's framed as a sort of horror/drama film.  The medical school where they do their experiments is some kind of converted mansion/cathedral/weeping angel statue warehouse.  It's got kind of a Hellraiser or Suspiria style of gothic, sumptuous horror.

There's many scenes that are outright ridiculous.  There's a moment where one of the characters is sitting in a car in an alleyway and slowly the lighting shifts, lighting up fearsome oni masks spray-painted on the walls.  Look out!  There is a skull just over his shoulder!  But there are also many scenes that are surprisingly effective at being creepy.  As the graffiti is lit up, a dog slithers forward, apparently crawling despite broken legs.  It's very worrying.  Similarly, as excitement about the near-death experiments mounts in the group, they begin ghoulishly bidding against each other, bargaining minutes spent in brain-death before being resuscitated, gambling with the decay of their own brains.  It's a great portrait of ambition run to crass recklessness; so ghoulish, so gross!

The film is interesting.  It's grappling with death and life and these very important, profound things.  I was kind of glad that it went the horror route, but the snob in me was disappointed.  Anyone can make death be scary.  The animal in us will always want to live, but we know we will have to die.  Help me to grapple with that, Hollywood!

I was honestly in the mood for a movie like this though: dumb enough to be sensational, smart enough to be tasteful.  There's other things to enjoy: one of the characters is symbolically linked to salvation.  The film cleverly makes him an atheist.  The film is set around Halloween which affords many opportunities for morbid visuals.

This was not a great film, but it was a good film and I enjoyed it a lot.  It both rose to and overcame its premise.

Odd Man Out (1947)

Saw Odd Man Out, an Irish noir film about an IRA member who goes missing/on the lam after a botched robbery.  The film is interesting.  It's got a good sense of the sinister outside of society, where people close their doors and don't want to get involved.  It put me in mind of war films or Holocaust films where the smallest things mean life or death.  In such a domestic setting, women seem to feature more prominently, whether they be betraying the protagonist by calling the police or helping them by patching them up.

The film proceeds like an action-y Hitchcock film until we get about halfway through, when a homeless man and a raving drunk artist show up and the film veers hard into camp.  It's a very strange departure which ties in thematically, but we move from realism into broad, Dickensian fantasy.  Then again, the main antagonist to the film is a handsome cop who carries a walking stick and uses it to tip up people's chins so he can look into their eyes.  Shades of Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds.

Although it also has a hefty helping of weary Irish melancholy, the film is very fun in a lot of ways.  Like war films, there are many near escapes which are always fun to watch.  Once the message of the film is theatrically declaimed, a lot falls into focus, but the ride up to that point is twisty and interesting and strange.

Swordfish (2001)

Saw Swordfish on the assumption that it was a dumb computer-hacker movie.  It was dumb, yes, but it turned out to be more of a heist movie.  There's crosses and double-crosses and smirking bad guys and all that jazz.  There is hacking which is a little tangential, but also dumb.

However, the main thing I noticed about this film, was this it was clearly trying to be The Matrix.  It opens with one of those famous rotate-y shots that The Matrix made famous and involves the main character (a hacker) being swallowed into a shadowy netherworld of shell corporations and government secrecy.  In one scene, there is even scrolling ascii characters, but these ones are scrolling sideways (so, you know, a completely original visual.)  Whereas The Matrix is not really set in any place (apart from a city of some kind,) this film is emphatically Los Angeles styled down to a yellow filter over everything.

So okay, but this movie is also very dumb.  In the modern heist-film tradition, it features a lot of trashiness: ladies in tight-fitting outfits lounge around everywhere and, as a particularly egregious example, the main character "auditions" for his role as heist hacker by cracking into a government website while being given a blowjob.  It's pretty crass.

Let me talk a little about the tech before wrapping up: the tech is absolutely nonsense.  They throw around random words which are not complete nonsense, but are unrelated to what's going on.  (eg: "I dropped a logic bomb." "You didn't have time.") There's a sequence where the main character codes for a little while which is gratuitous and heightened.  It's unreal but only because the character is dancing with happiness or rubbing his eyes with dismay.  The emotions are right, but they are more muted: annoyance followed by the satisfaction of seeing a green message appear rather than a red one, then on to the next red message.  It's dumb but I'll forgive it.  Watching someone stare at a screen, typing slowly, waiting for a minute and then grunting would not be compelling cinema.

Okay, so final thoughts: this was a big dumb movie, but I basically expected a big dumb movie.  I think it more or less succeeded in what it set out to do which was to give you, the male viewer, a little titillation and excitement mixed in with your power fantasy.  There's a couple of pointless chase scenes and the main antagonist is frustratingly smug, but if we're going to ding it for containing pointless stuff, well the whole movie is a little pointless, so what do you want?  This is a big dumb movie which is big and dumb.

A Touch of Zen (1971)

Saw A Touch of Zen.  It starts out as a fairly typical samurai movie (actually the genre is wuxia, according to imdb, but I don't know if I will remember this phrase) which makes a sudden and dramatic veer in the last half hour or so of its runtime.

The main character is a painter in a small town.  He lives in an abandoned castle which is said to be haunted.  He is quickly caught up in political machinations, defending the princess of a disgraced clan from the underlings of an evil eunuch (of course.)  There's a recurrent image of a spider web which seems to be initially used to imply the web of deceit which our heroes are caught up in and which is later subverted when the heroes spin a crafty scheme of their own.  I'm not a big action fan, so I'm hardly the target audience, but I found the story to be fairly humdrum.  It's the usual thing: noble heroes, faceless soldiers, a conspiracy slowly crystalizing.  You can probably see the broad outlines coming.

The film is also edited in a confusing way.  Due to the technical limitations of the time, they often cut away just as someone is getting stabbed and then cut back to the bloody aftermath.  But they also cut away for other reasons, sometimes for no reason at all.  Characters will appear and disappear from a fight scene, or will suddenly be in the village or away from it.  We know time is passing, but the film does not hold our hand through this.  We're just suddenly one year later.  I found this very confusing and it made the plot difficult for me to follow, however truth be told I was not trying all that hard.  Anyway, the third act really took me by surprise.

The film is three hours long and, in about the last half hour or so, completely shifts focus, losing track of the princess in a sudden jump-cut.  The painter hunts for her, but we lose track of him too, rediscovering the princess in a show-down with a general, a monk acting as her ally.  This sequence is not directly to do with the main characters, but is a battle with strange, religious, philosophical overtones.  It's all portrayed symbolically, which is to say indirectly, though fades and juxtaposition, downfall coming from mysterious avenues.  I get the sense of a message being communicated.  It's very evocative.

I don't know that the last half hour makes the rest of the film worth it for me, but that ending was very interesting

The Whale

Saw The Whale, a grotesque but uplifting film about a morbidly obese gay man who is facing down his last days, trying to make amends and trying, in his words, to do one good thing.  The film is directed by Darren Aronofsky, who is fond of films about self-destructive characters.  This one features a lot of addictions and simultaneous with that, a lot of empathy and attempts at saving the main character.  All of the characters damage the protagonist in their own ways, even as they try to help him.  Even his nurse friend enables his food addiction, however I don't know if this is helpful or not.  Addiction is a difficult thing.

The film is based on a play and retains many of its theater bones.  Much of the action happens in the main character's living room.  Sometimes he leaves and the other characters remain, to explain backstory to each other.  A nosy Mormon (well not really Mormon but a lawsuit-safe pseudo-Mormon) acts as an impetus for a lot of backstory drops.  The stage setting helps to make the film feel claustrophobic, isolated, trapped within its own body.

The film is terribly sad.  The main character is utterly pathetic, constantly murmuring "I'm sorry." as his exasperated support network shouts at him or begs him to go to a hospital.  In spite of his own self-destructive coping mechanism, he retains a solid core of values that he is willing to die for.  His character is written slightly cattily.  There are many zingers and one-liners.  He has the feel of The Man Who Came To Dinner, but thankfully he's merely played in a sleepy, avuncular way by Brendan Fraser.

There's also many moments when the protagonist is likened to Moby Dick, of the novel by the same name.  He is the white whale for many of the characters: the one monstrous thing that, if they could only fix, if they could only solve, they would have achieved their life's work.  But the monster in the fat protagonist is the same monster that is killing all of us.  Everyone in the film is struggling, all of them quietly self-destructing as they fail to address their own problems and turn inwards, devouring themselves.

It's a sad and tough film.  It has a warm heart, but it is not clear that this is enough.  It reminded me of The Kid Nobody Could Handle, a similarly melancholy story by melancholy author Kurt Vonnegut.  Like this film, it is also about the impossibility and necessity of reaching each other.

The Devil Is a Woman (1935)

Saw The Devil Is a Woman, another film based on the same source material as The Obscure Object Of Desire.  Whereas that film frames the war of the sexes as being analogous to class struggle, this one is far more straight-forward.  We have a scheming prostitute vs a dignified and imposing officer.  It's not so much about class as it is about a woman behaving terribly and getting away with everything.  I'm inclined to dislike the prostitute character, but then again the officer is no prize either.  He is goaded beyond endurance, but beyond endurance lies domestic assault apparently.

So it's just a film about terrible people behaving terribly.  Oh dear.  The prostitute is played by Marlene Dietrich, who is always a delight to watch as long as she's being bad.  She's fun in this and interesting to watch but she only seems to have one trick: to stamp her foot and declare that whoever she's trying to manipulate doesn't really lover her.  It's so silly!

The film plays as a black comedy, satirizing the lengths people will go through to torment each other when a relationship goes bad.  There's comic business involving the cops and cackling madams and schemes to bilk the officer out of his money.  The plot is quite bleak but it seems played for laughs.  I am either too sophisticated or not sophisticated enough to laugh, but it's pleasant in its own quaint way.

Tale of Tales (2015)

Saw Tale of Tales, a very fanciful film based on a trio of Italian fairytales.  The film is very pretty, very sumptuous, and full of fairytale strangeness.  It's a sort of deconstruction however unlike Shrek, say, this one is overly serious, almost dour.  A queen is obsessed with keeping an eye on her child.  She is played as controlling and obsessive.  She is not a cypher, but a flawed human being living in a time of magic and miracles.

The film is sensual, full of rich colors and dark shadows.  It's got very little dialogue which helps to underscore the universal, mythic flavor of the stories.  I have to admit that whatever deep themes or allegorical, universal truths the film has to offer up passed me by.  Like fairy tales, this film was very strange, very creative, but that was kind of all.  It had the raw feeling of dreams - something that will stick in your mind, but which may not change how you feel about a thing.  An oblique addition to the conversation.

I enjoyed the movie, but it's very singular.  I wouldn't recommend it except as a vehicle for seeing strange things.  It's very dark but not in a silly, goth-y kind of way.  It's an interesting, pretty film.

Teorema (1968)

Saw Teorema (AKA Theorem).  It was directed by Pier Pasolini, he of the Salo fame.  This film focuses on a middle-class family who welcomes a mysterious male guest into their house.  The maid is fascinated by him, opening the film with a suicide attempt in an effort to attract his notice.  Next, the son of the family finds himself strangely attracted to the smiling guest.  Then the mother, daughter, and even the father are seduced by this man.  He awakens strange, intense passions within them and then leaves the film entirely and leaves the family to deal with the fallout of his visit.

Before the credits, we see cameramen interviewing factory workers, talking to them about political revolution and how the middle class, now free from religion and beginning to free itself from capitalism, must now empathize with the common man.  We establish the film as taking place in the post-modern intellectual sphere we find ourselves in now: the church is corrupt, the government is corrupt, soon even intelligentsia itself will be revealed to be corrupt.  What role can we play now to give our lives meaning?

This film sort of absurdly posits sexual/romantic experiences as a source of meaning.  The free love revolution was close at hand and we spend half of the film watching the various characters deal with their romantic involvement with the mysterious guest.  Some of the family it destroys.  The mother is awoken to the emptiness in her life, but is given nothing to fill that void with.  Then again, others of the family find transcendence and the profoundest sort of meaning as a result.

The film is spare and strange.  It's an art film first, with heightened artificiality.  There's inexplicably silent sequences, clumsy overdubbing, and cuts to some hellish black desert.  (Apparently this film is part of Pasolini's "Mythical" cycle - perhaps this connects to the other films.  Pigsty (of the same cycle) seems to feature this desert in the trailer))  The various seductions are fun in a smutty sort of way, but I was gratified to see the fall-out play out as well.  Many absurdists are content to undermine the middle class by punching below the belt, but I felt this film had somewhat more compassion.  Not only are the hypocrisies of this middle-class family exposed, but then they must live with it.  Interesting.

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

Saw Three Thousand Years of Longing, a fabulous film about a woman who researches storytelling who finds a genuine genie in a bottle while travelling.  The bulk of the film takes place in flashbacks as the genie tells his story of imprisonment and granting wishes.  It's a sumptuous and pretty film.  It reminded me of The Fall (which is one of my favorite films) only somewhat more upbeat.

The point of the film is to see strange, fairy-tale-like scenarios play out with courtesans and generals.  The visuals are eye-popping and, even when we spend some time back in England, near the end of the film, the visuals are still amped, brining us a heightened, fantastical feel.  I was most interested in the dynamic between the woman and the genie.  She's never really sure that he's not some kind of monkey's-paw style ironical granter of wishes.  Very often the wishes that are granted work out badly for the wisher or for the genie or both.

This delightful ambiguity resonates with an internet theory which didn't occur to me but which I think adds spice to the film: that the genie is a figment of the woman's imagination.  There are many connections between the characters in the genie's past and the woman's own life.  Not being able to tell if the genie is really real or not adds some level of magic to the film: that not only could we madden ourselves to the point of believing in magic, but it may benefit us in the end too!

An adorable film.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

Saw The Adventures of Robin Hood, a technicolor spectacular starring Errol Flynn, the Tom Cruise of his time.  The film is not particularly stirring, but it is very pleasantly shot.  Technicolor was new at the time and although much of the film is shot in the woods, they had not gotten bored with woods as they actually are at that time.  So, despite much effort to make the woods of California look authentically like the woods of England, it mostly winds up looking like someone's backyard.  It's a strange element of naturalism in an otherwise extremely stagey and mannered film.Indeed, the laid-back nature of Robin Hood coupled with the naturalistic nature scenes made me think of films of the 70s, with their preoccupation with the individual vs society.

The film cannot be mistaken for a film from the 70s however.  There's a lot of bursting out in hearty laughs and quaint discussions of love for that.  The characters all do that stage thing where they seem to be shouting at each other all of the time.  It's a little silly, but that's the 30s for you.  Film was still relatively young.

Anyway, the film is very quaint, very sweet.  It's got a lot of swashbuckling and action scenes, but its heart is in the scenes where Robin laughingly parlays his wit with Prince John or with the Sheriff of Nottingham, tricking them and answering their verbal traps with cunning repartee.  That's the bit I liked best anyway.  The film is a romp of Robin outwitting the unjust state, and who can dislike that?

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022)

Saw Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, a parody bio-pic about the rise of Weird Al, from his humble youth growing up in a factory town, to high-school where he begins to sneak out to wild polka parties and has a fateful run-in with a slick accordion salesman.  Once his talent is recognized in a dive bar frequented by Dr Demento, he's catapulted to fame and glory, ultimately winning the prestigious Perhaps Not Technically The Best, But Arguably The Most Famous Accordion Player In An Extremely Specific Genre Of Music Award.  Truly, an inspiring film.

The film contains many parodies of the musical bio-pic genre, spoofing Boogie Nights and The Doors' LSD-fueled tours (and wow, Daniel Radcliff (who plays Weird Al) is jacked!)  As you might be able to gather from the above, it is not exactly faithful to the truth, but it is entertainingly nutty and funny in a wholesome sort of way.  There's a lot of great comedy mined from the film being unreliable in its narration.  Also, we get great scenes of Al "discovering" parody concepts for various songs.

Being a comedy, the film is somewhat slight.  We don't plumb the depths of the human condition and we don't grapple with man's inhumanity with man, but we get some silly hijinks and some laughs at the hubris of a man taking liberties with his own story, and that's pretty good.  No regrets.  Pretty fun!

Three Colours: Red (1994)

Saw Three Colours: Red, the last in the trilogy.  This film is concerned with brotherhood.  It's much more visceral and dramatic than the other two films and, I felt, had a much more interesting soundtrack.  It follows Valentine, a model and student, versus a retired judge (who never gets a name despite getting second billing in the cast.)  Optimistic Valentine believes that people are basically decent and good whereas the judge has seen enough misery to conclude that people are basically selfish and cruel.

The film plays out slowly, involving various other folks in its plot, the camera mildly roving the streets, following a person here, drifting into a window there.  The theme of brotherhood seems obscure to me, except in the broadest sense of us all being brothers (in a way.)

The most compelling part of the film is the slow philosophical argument played out between the two main characters.  Luckily for me, they settle their differences with grand dramatic gestures: sending one an invite to a fashion show, or adopting a dog.  Such drama!  Such pathos!

We never really get into why the judge is this way.  He references some old love affair, but the judges cynical malaise is endemic on the internet, where to be outraged is to be aware, where to be disillusioned is to be wise.  My understanding is that such misery is often idealism that is curdled and gone sour: a belief that since one's life is not like a rom-com then either you have been lied to or cheated.  The solution presented in the film of unwavering decency and quiet outrage in the face of leering cruelty does not scale.  It supposes that there is more optimism in the world than cynicism and I'm not sure this is the case.  It would have been better, perhaps, to have the model out-clever the judge by pointing out that people are both good and bad and that if you watch only the bad, then that's all you'll see.  But maybe this is just cheap sophistry.  It's a difficult problem.

Anyway the film is pretty good, very dramatic and with a few really dazzling scenes (when the law student is on the balcony, wow!) the score was banging and it was a nice, wholesome, uplifting film.  A good note to end on!

Three Colours: White (1994)

Saw Three Colours: White, the second in the three colors trilogy.  This one was about equality.  It's less staid than the first one, more satisfying and straightforward in its primary plot, however a little more obscure in how it connects to its color theme of equality.

the film follows Karol, a hairdresser, who opens the film being divorced by his wife.  She leaves him without possessions or home, cruelly leaving him on the streets, somehow freezing his bank cards, gloating about winning his property in court, and even threatening to frame him for arson when he tries to come back.  She asks him "Do I make you afraid?"  He is re-born, all but naked, into the world, re-born by this trauma.  The rest of the film shows him slowly climbing out of this hole, becoming his own master once more.  The film's ending brings the theme home in a very clear way, but you should see it yourself.

I enjoyed the film.  It was more visceral and straightforward than the first one I saw, but it is still a Kieslowski film.  He's more into subtlety than histrionics and this film contains a lot of unusual plot points and slow payoffs.  The theme of equality is sort of subverted (as I've come to expect!) but it's not layered into the narrative the same way it was with Blue.  I don't know.  I liked this one okay, it just felt a little thinner than the last one, a little more on the surface.  Maybe I'm just missing the depths?

Three Colours: Blue (1993)

Saw Three Colours: Blue (1993), a typically knotty film by Kieslowski, he of the Decalogue fame.  This film series, the colours trilogy deals with the themes symbolized by the three colors of the French flag.  This film, Blue, is related to freedom.

As we have learned recently here in the US, freedom is a tricky thing: there is a "freedom to" and a "freedom from".  This film follows a widow whose husband and child were tragically and suddenly killed.  The widow is very suddenly "free from" and she retreats into this world of unmoored, empty freedom.  She finds herself needing to remake herself, rediscovering who she is outside of her family.  This is not a feminist empowerment film, but a film about loss and how the world has a way of filling the voids in your life.  It is half kind and half cruel.

We see images of life continuing around the widow's island of solitude.  She swims in a pool which is suddenly invaded by many screaming children.  She refuses to participate in a petition and becomes remarkable by not participating.  Even in the retreat, she is running into life again.

And of course there's a whole mess of blue symbolism.  In addition to the swimming pool that she luxuriates in, there's a blue plastic decoration she hangs on to.  Her husband's papers are wrapped in a blue envelope and her daughter's last candy was a blue lollypop.  Frequently there are scenes of her face with glints of blue light playing over it, often when she's resisting human connection.

The film is interesting.  It's not very visceral or exciting, but it sets up little puzzles and slowly and subtly but only rarely pays them off.  This is a film for thinking about and talking about.  It's not obscurantist, so there is a sort of solution layed out in the imdb trivia, but the engine of this film is in its meditation over loss and isolation, which is a freedom of a kind.

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.