The Spine of Night (2021)

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

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

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

Thelma & Louise (1991)

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

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

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

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

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

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

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

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

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

Olympia (1938)

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

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

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

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

March of the Wooden Soldiers (1934)

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

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

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

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

Fellini's Casanova (1976)

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

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

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

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

Mad God (2021)

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

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

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