This film has all the elements of Italian cinematic magnificence, even if it is two and a half hours long, is a bit slow in places, and is full of cheesy 70s motifs.  But wait! That’s exactly what makes it magnificent!

Like most spaghetti westerns, Duck, You Sucker is a film about male camaraderie amongst the unruly, lonesome, uber-moral men of the west. We can look back on Leone’s Dollars Trilogy and report on this same trope with the lone Biondo/Joe (a.k.a. il buono…Eastwood) and his nemesis Angel Eyes/Col. Mortimer (a.k.a. il brutto…Lee Van Cleef), along with the usually annoying hanger-on, Tuco (a.k.a. il cattivo…Eli Wallach).

Duck, You Sucker also has a Tuco-esque hanger-on, and that’s the Mexican bandito, Juan Miranda, played by Rod Steiger.  Though I will say that Wallach’s attempt at a Mexican accent was a lot better than Steiger’s (it was quite painful at times), seeing them both (and others) in these roles is a chilling reminder that even in the 1970s, there was a reluctance to use Mexican actors, or even Spanish actors (considering it was filmed in Spain like The Dollars Trilogy), out of the desire to appeal to a particular audience that would want to continue seeing its white, male, American actors in lead roles. Fellini did it, Argento and Antonioni did it (with British actors such as David Hemmings), and Leone certainly did it with his previous movies. What’s done is done.   At least James Coburn played an Irishman (IRA member John Mallory) though his affected accent faded in and out.

Overall, this was an amazing film: the storyline, the character development (you can develop a lot in 2.5 hours!), the action, the humor. The scene on the stagecoach when Mallory is kneeling at the shrine that Miranda’s family had set up, just moments before the “cigarette” he had just lit exploded in vengeful triumph against Miranda’s attempt to detain him, is classic dramatic irony. The viewer knows it’s a dirty trick, but Leone capitalizes on the innocence of Miranda and his crew, perhaps in a way to insinuate the intellectual superiority of Mallory (???).  Miranda tries to trap him; Mallory blows their stuff up; in the end, they work together.  I guess it all works out.

But how CAN Miranda be both innocent (in terms of his own ignorance) and so corrupt at the same time?  I suppose Leone presents the viewer with a tale of men and the spectrum of possibilities amongst them. The viewer will notice that absolutely NO female characters are present in this film other than in flashback or in the beginning when Miranda has his way with the lone woman on the hijacked stagecoach (she doesn’t resist once the viewer sees she is not displeased with his presentation).  This is typical of this genre of film, and other genres preceding (I’m thinking of sword-and-sandal films with Hercules out on manly adventures alone in the world): the absence of woman means an overemphasis on man and man’s camaraderie with himself.  Not necessarily homo-erotic, though there are always scenes in which sweaty, dirty men are wrestling around with each other.  But by the end of Duck, You Sucker, Miranda and Mallory are setting off on an adventure together, as companions, with no other ties to anyone else in the world, therefore reinforcing the importance of male bonding/companionship. Of course, the honeymoon doesn’t last long, as Mallory meets his death in the only way befitting an IRA explosives-man:  with a bang!

Back to the duality of Miranda’s innocence/corruption versus Mallory’s ability to outwit:  the only way I can reconcile this is that Leone is presenting the viewer with a premise for one being the intellectual superior, though in the end, it’s Miranda who lives and Mallory who dies. So the line can’t be drawn quite so distinctly. Perhaps Leone is telling us that we have to learn from each other, work with each other, and support each other in order to make it through life; and in the end, make sure you know how to dodge bullets really well—this is something Miranda was much better at in a school-of-hard-knocks sort of way, whereas Mallory had more of an Odyssean quality of honed guile and wit—able to get out of sticky situations but sometimes always teetering on the edge of being outgunned.

Lastly, the flashback sequences of Mallory back in Ireland present almost an anachronistic quality to the film in addition to a very cheesy, 70s feeling. Though set in the deserts of Mexico, periodically the viewer would be treated to slow snippets of Mallory’s past life with motor cars, wool jackets and turtlenecks, girls with ribbons in their hair, and IRA raids in public houses—all in slow motion. It is in these flashbacks that the viewer sees more of a sense of homoeroticism, in Mallory’s strange love triangle with a fellow IRA member and what appears to be their joint girlfriend. It’s hard to tell who’s jealous of who in these sequences, to be honest. It isn’t until nearly the end of the film that the viewer sees the culmination of this retrospective jealousy, but it does lend some credence to the idea that male companionship and bonding is a very deliberate and predominant theme presented to us by Leone, and it spans cultures.

I’ve only barely scratched the surface here.

I don’t think I could get away with talking about this film without mentioning the amazingly beautiful music by Ennio Morricone. Wow! So perfectly timed, comical, and dramatic. What an amazing composer. Leone’s lucky to have kept him for this film.

But underneath her subdued exterior is some sort of artistic genius. She is a painter, though she must work very hard to earn the money to buy the supplies to then make her paints. But her vision, as told through her paintings, is a colorful, voluptuous nature—plants with so many leaves it’s impossible for there to be any realistic quality to the object in the painting because the object itself has multiplied upon itself in a way that overwhelms the viewer with its insensibility.  Well, that’s how I see them at least.

Turns out there is a real Seraphine, known as Seraphine de Senlis, upon which this film is based.  They are her paintings; it is her life the film represents.  And what the film tells me is that a sense of self and place can be maintained by habituation, even in the midst of the most awful circumstances, but when a door to the outside world opens up, is shut, opens up again, and is shut again (so she thinks), then an already fragile sanity hangs in the balance.

This is what happened to Seraphine: she managed to live her cleaning-lady/closet-artist existence by accepting the habits of daily life without ever anticipating relief, but when a spectacularly unimaginable escape was presented to her (having a benefactor, the possibility of showing her art in Paris, etc.), and the ECONOMY (the US stock market crash of 1929) caused a ripple effect all the way out in the outskirts of her already meager living, she could no longer fathom a return to a one-room, laundry-washing existence.  I guess she cracked. The divine hand of the guardian angel who guided her art told her to give away her things, and dressed in a virginal wedding gown of denied conjugal love, she walked out of a life of art and creativity and into a life of white walls, straight jackets, and tears.

I suppose we should all take away from the story of Seraphine, a will to practice and perfect our own creativity in whatever outlets we are naturally geared toward; despite economics or joblessness or even employment, happiness is being able to reconcile our self within our self.

The image I’m left with from this film is Seraphine dressed up in her white silk and taffeta wedding gown, heading for the marriage of her soul to god, I suppose—the first time she’s worn anything that wasn’t black or dark blue—and it’s then that she’s picked up by the police because of her behavior; stripped down to her very core, that part of herself that was raw and pure and mentally unstable, she is no longer protected by the dark exterior of her cleaning clothes and her habitude, and she is hauled in to spend the rest of her days in an asylum with white walls that mock the very idea of the painter’s canvas. Sad.

I’m sure I’ve said it in nearly every single post I’ve ever written about a Herzog film, but what I like most about his films are their characteristically Herzoggian qualities: real footage, clearly real people used as actors, slow folky music, and many times the spasmodic intensity of Klaus Kinski. Now, don’t get me wrong here: I’m not going to go into a rave over Kinski’s acting skills or something like that; rather, I’d prefer to just point out that Kinski’s ability to unleash himself in front of the camera is part of his mystique. Actually, Kinski-as-Count-Dracula doesn’t specifically take up a large amount of face-time on camera; but when he’s there, he’s there. When Dracula lunges at Jonathan, it isn’t in a pull-your-punch sort of way–a surge from Kinski is a surge from the real Count. This was an appreciably noticeable quality also in Woyzeck, when Woyzeck is stabbing Marie.  Herzog has a way of framing his characters that provides an added layer of intensity, and when Count Dracula enters Jonathan’s room for the first time, the poised hands, bulbous white head, and cowering shadowyness of the vampyre makes the viewer react similarly to Jonathan (run!) although not with quite the same shriek!  Imagine yourself looking up to find those luscious lips against such pale skin coming after your neck.

As with most Herzog films, the issue of trust in science was brought up. Lucy clearly didn’t trust the efficacy of Dr. Van Helsing’s proposed scientific method for determining the root of Jonathan’s ailments. Multiple times he proposed a thorough scientific evaluation and she brushed him off. In the end, though he had to trust that the vampire book held the key to their troubles, he still sought to find a scientific explanation for the general problem. Meanwhile, Jonathan’s riding off into the desert on a horse, seemingly insane, seemingly succumbing to his multiple vampire bites.  Maybe there are no scientific explanations for things; or there are no reasons to attempt to identify, scientifically, the root causes and cures for certain diseases. There certainly seems to be some sort of message about mental illness that Herzog’s trying to tell us because Jonathan’s boss, Mr. Renfield, is clearly insane.  Renfield’s insanity helps propagate Dracula’s disease(s)–he brings vampirism and the plague with him from Transylvania. Either Renfield was already insane and was somehow planted by Dracula, or he was driven insane by his orders (i.e. the letter he received from Dracula) to send Jonathan across the Carpathian Mountains to certain death…one might wonder what the point was of sending Jonathan at all….hmm….maybe a plot-hole.

We know for sure that in other Herzog films, such as Woyzeck, there is a severe doubt cast on scientists, doctors, and academics so there’s something to be said about that in this film also.  And, we might as well throw religion in there as well. One of the funniest moments of the film, if any moments could be categorized as funny, is when Dracula is hiding his various black caskets around the city when he first arrives in Germany. One of the locations he places a casket is in an old ruined church; after he has set down the casket, he notices a crucifix hanging on the wall and he gives it a “hrmmmphf” and a swatting of the hand, then he barrels out the door on to his next location.

I’m not much into the lore of vampires and Count Dracula so I don’t quite understand the significance of bringing the plague to Germany with him other than to give credence to the theory that vampires don’t actually exist, but it is actually the plague that kills people. I can’t imagine why Count Dracula would want to decimate his ready-dinners by killing them all off with plague first. Must be some ulterior message in there.  But Herzog does have Dr. Van Helsing drive a stake into Dracula’s heart nonetheless, just in case, since that’s what he read to do in the vampire book.

I wish this could be a better post, but for the time being, it’ll have to do until my brain can be re-vamped!

What is nauseating is that Food, Inc. acts like it came up with its own format, when in actuality, it plagiarized and appropriated its format directly from The Future of Food!

Shameless!  It makes me sick that within a mere 4 years, another filmmaker could come out with the same film and not even reference its predecessor.

Sure, in Food, Inc., they based the first half of their film on the mass production of MEAT, which was not covered in The Future of Food, but in exactly the same vein as The Future of Food, the 2nd half of Food, Inc. was devoted to GMO soybeans and corn (GMO corn is covered to a great extent in The Future of Food) and the exploitation of farmers by who else but MONSANTO!

I’m disappointed that, as a viewing nation, we are too stupid to even recognize, or care about, the obviousness of this plagiaristic appropriation.

We have too few memories.

What I liked about this film was first its amazing special effects, and second, the ballsyness of its allegory.

First, the special effects seem quite advanced. But then again, the film is directed by Fritz Lang so the viewer is not entirely surprised. If we recall Metropolis (1927) with its industrial setting and its explosions and mechanization, we can see Lang’s practice made perfect in Dr. Mabuse.  One of the most notable effects moments is in the opening sequence when Mabuse’s thugs explode a barrel of some sort of fuel, which causes a massive explosion and a clean slate afterward. I was surprised by the cleanness of the explosion and its aftermath. Boom! Gone but not forgotten.

Much later on in the film, when Dr. Mabuse’s ghost comes a hauntin’, the viewer is treated to a very creepy, totally transformed alien-like face for Dr. Mabuse. His eyes are big and buggy, he’s crouched over, and more importantly, he’s spectral on screen. Why does this stand out so much as a feat of cinematography? Well, I suppose because it was 1933 and Lang was already perfecting his techniques of overlay. The viewer can’t help but be impressed is what I’m trying to say.

In terms of the ballsyness of this film’s allegory, I’d have to say that the final scene is indicative of a real sense of “stick it to ya.”  When the tides have turned for Professor Baum, who has now assumed Dr. Mabuse’s place in the psych ward, Commissioner Lohmann says something to the effect of: ‘I’m just the police. I don’t understand things like this,’ in reference to the clearly disturbing nature of the Mabuse-Baum crime ring, and the way in which Dr. Mabuse’s criminally insane spirit has now taken over the body and mind of Prof. Baum, an otherwise professional, educated (presumably a “should-be-smarter-than-that” kind of person), and well-respected man. What Commissioner Lohmann is saying, to me, is that a devotion to such levels of insane behavior and thought is beyond his comprehension, even though it is his business to deal with the criminal mind. So I suppose he is saying that there are degrees of criminality that the common man, and police man, can fathom; and then there are levels of criminal insanity that are beyond even a seasoned professional’s comprehension. Certainly, in retrospect, the rest of the world knows this is truth because we know the extent to which the Nazis and Hitler were willing to go for their insane plan of purity and purification. Ouch! Stick it to ya!

This film was very well made on quite a few different levels. The narrative/writing was impressive: especially the scenes in which the investigators were piecing together the puzzle Hoffmeister had left for them (having etched Mabuse’s name into glass upside down). And today, we think the concept of ” CSI” is something new to behold!  The acting was impressive: from Dr. Mabuse to Professor Baum to Hoffmeister, and even to Commissioner Lohmann: all embodied their characters perfectly, naturally. The cinematography and effects were impressive, as mentioned before. And, last but not least, the allegory Lang presents lends well to true meaning-making for the viewer.

I think the viewer can relate to this film because it is allegorical: we can see the obviousness of the message in retrospect. But at the time, I suppose it was too fantastical, kind of like the lengths to which the Nazis went to spread their terror in that BIG LIE sort of way.

This is a pretty long film, at 2  1/2 hrs.  And, considering I’ve seen Tarkovsky’s Solyaris (1972), I considered myself in for a slow ride with Stalker. I’d like to note here that having read Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris (1961), and seen the Clooney/Soderbergh (2002) remake of the film, the 2002 film is more committed to the novel’s narrative, and Tarkovsky’s film is more abstract.  From this I can perhaps intuit something about the potential for Tarkovsky’s artistic license with his adaptation of The Roadside Picnic.

With that being said, the most prominent thing about this film is clearly the cinematography. There is a stark contrast between the Town and the Zone. The Town is filmed in sepia-tones (sometimes perhaps in B/W) and the Zone is filmed in color. In Town, the atmosphere is muddy, grey, povertified (seems like a good time to coin a new term). All of the floors have mud and water on them in Town. Everything glistens with mud. A complete look at the setting itself is obscured from the viewer, and even when the Stalker is driving the Writer and the Scientist around, avoiding the police, there is no real perception-of-space-or-place because of the way the scenes are shot. This gives way to a feeling of limited space; in other words, of a sense of living and existing in confined quarters, in a confined neighborhood, in a confined city, in a confined country; in a confined psyche perhaps?

The Zone, once they get there, is richly green. Trees and grasses everywhere. Then the viewer notices that all of the characters have blue eyes, characteristics otherwise obscured from the viewer in Town. There is clearly a difference between what goes on in Town and what goes on in the Zone. As the film progresses, it becomes perhaps a little more obvious as to why. Strewn throughout the Zone are downed power lines and rusted out tanks and automobiles. Apparently a meteor fell to create the Zone, and all of this devastation must have been the aftermath. However, there isn’t sufficient information provided to the viewer about the meteor, the fallout, why the Zone was created, other than civilization is sectioned off from the Zone, behind barricades, in order to keep people away from it (nature, the mysterious) out of fear of the place. Very much in a Brave New World sort of way in terms of the reservation; or in a 1984 sort of way with the Prole sectors. Or better yet, exactly like Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel, We (1921), with its cordoned off sector for civilization hermetically sealed off from the wilderness (i.e. disorder and nature).

Something that becomes obvious in the Zone is that it is also a muddy, wet place, like in Town. Eventually the three men make their way to some buildings, where the elusive Wish Room is, and it is full of water and mud and discarded objects, and old sewer-looking tunnels, and ponds of chest-high stagnant water that must be trudged through. The entire environment is damp and muddy. A cesspool. A beautifully-lit cesspool, I might add.

The way the three men make their way through the Zone to the Wish Room is very interesting. The Stalker is the guide, but his process is very meticulous and rigid to the rules he has learned from his predecessor (the late Porcupine).  The Stalker has to first throw a bolt with a bandage attached to it, one of his companions must go first toward the bolt, then the rest of them follow. Then the Stalker picks up the bolt, throws it, and this is how they make their way. They do not go straight. In this way, they sort of “test” their path first before embarking. Almost in a way that they are notifying the Zone itself that they are going in that particular direction, along that particular path. The Zone is apparently an ever-changing place, full of tricks and traps and mystical happenings. They zig-zag up and down and all around. It is the process itself that is the most important part. It is the respecting of the sanctity of the Zone’s temperament that is the most important rule.

When the three men finally make it to the Wish Room, there is a peripatetic moment : The Scientist (a.k.a. the Professor) has been carrying a bomb, intending the entire time to blow up the Wish Room. The Writer seems to be in agreement with this action because he cannot yet bring himself to enter the room and be granted his innermost wish. The Wish Room grants you what you want deep inside of you, not what you think you want. This is something he is not ready to accept so he feels the Scientist’s decision to blow it up is better for everyone involved (so that maniacs and aristocrats can’t come to the Wish Room and get what their perverted hearts truly desire). But the Stalker cannot let this happen. Eventually, the Scientist is talked out of this drastic measure by means of the other two talking it out.

So what is this film about? The final scene in the Zone presents the viewer with an interesting position: while the three men (the Stalker can not enter the room anyway) sit outside the room, staring in, the camera brings the viewer inside the room, deep. What does the viewer see? Nothing; just the three men on the ground, in the water, crying, sulking. But then, as the viewer, you realize you’re in the Wish Room!  Tarkovsky is forcing the viewer to reflect on his/her innermost wish.   And as all of this is taking place, as the viewer is in the room, the room which the viewer technically cannot see all of, cannot see what the men are seeing, the Writer gives part of the mystery away: the Wish Room is essentially faith in God, and battling to destroy God from the outside is science and logic/reason, represented by the Scientist (he’s a physicist) and the Writer (he’s a novelist). It is the Writer who reveals this truth to the viewer in an abstract way. I can’t quote here because first of all, the subtitles were clearly off because of their poor grammar, and I didn’t write any of it down; you’ll have to trust me.  The Stalker, then, represents a conduit to God that is unable to attain, for whatever reason, that which is available to everyone else. He does not appear to represent the clergy, for instance. But the Stalker is the most faithful. He leads people there at his own peril. But he is sworn to not enter the Wish Room.  One thing is for certain: a theme of compassion is presented throughout the film in terms of the Stalker’s dialogue. A need to understand and practice compassion in the world. He is somehow a conduit to God via compassion. Perhaps the answer is this: he is compassion and compassion is a conduit to God.  Something like that maybe.

At the end of the film, the three men return to the Town, after none of them entered the Wish Room, the Stalker’s wife comes and gets him (and his newly acquired Zone dog–clearly a metaphor for something), and they return with their daughter (a.k.a. Monkey), past a smoking 3-4 stack nuclear plant, to their home where the wife proceeds to tell the viewer directly that her husband has always been touched by God, and therefore ridiculed for it, that he is a prisoner of the Zone in the sense that he is so faithful to leading people to it, that he can do nothing else. Then the film ends on Monkey (who has crippled legs) out on the porch moving drinking glasses using telekinesis while a train rumbles by (same train rumbling by that began the film).

I think the Dalai Lama would like this film for its message of compassion.  It really is beautifully filmed. The dialogue is such that it needs to be re-watched in order to really understand the ultimate goal of the film. The viewer can walk away at the end with an idea about compassion and God and science and logic trying to kill God, but there’s much more in there to find out by re-listening to the characters’ words.

This film depicts how one act of what I would consider violence and trauma, for the ultimate goal of freedom, can affect one’s perception and perpetuation of the Self.  Hedwig even says/sings that her one inch is angry.  The viewer must therefore consider that the act of the botched sex change was a regrettable moment for Hedwig, especially with the irony of the Wall coming down so soon after the deed-of-emancipation was done.

I think one of the most remarkable parts of this film was the way in which the director (John Cameron Mitchell, who plays the protagonist) presents Hedwig (formerly known as Hansel) as an individual with an amazing degree of self-awareness.  It is the lyrics of the songs, and the animations/dance numbers that accompany several of the musical scenes, that provide the best evidence of Hedwig’s intelligence and Self-awareness. And those scenes prove why this film is about life and living through disappointment and extreme trauma by pushing through and persevering despite the odds against you.

Hedwig is a very diverse character. She is clever. She is heartless. She is controlling. She is desperate for acceptance. She is tremendously creative.  She is traumatized. She is manipulative. She is more intelligent than anyone else. She is defeated. She is emotional. She is hardened. She is angry. She is capable of being ultimately happy.  She also looks really great as a woman!

This film reminds me that desperation leads people to do just about anything to be free and therefore happy. As humans, we go to great lengths to attain freedom and happiness, and in Hedwig’s case, she sacrificed five out of six of Hansel’s inches to get there! It’s a daunting reminder that there are individuals out in the world who struggle with issues many could not even fathom. Freedom comes at a great cost, sometimes costing freedom itself. Freedom to love, freedom to be loved, freedom to be happy in the way you had always envisioned it. Freedom to be free even.

This is a sad movie. But it’s also a happy movie. The viewer is escorted through Hansel’s and  Hedwig’s lives, and is treated to an insider’s look at the results of the traumas endured. Would Hansel’s or Hedwig’s life have been completely different had s/he been born in America instead of having to escape from East Germany by the (fore)skin of her/his teeth? Who knows. We are still facing a great deal of oppression in this country when it comes to gay rights. How is this happy, you say? Because, as a great man likes to say: “Happiness is being.”  And I think that’s what we, as viewers, are supposed to take away from this film.

I’m a big fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey (the film and the series of books), and this parody of 2001 was a real treat. But the term parody is used quite loosely because the part of Dark Star that was trying to imitate 2001 was a very short segment that ended quite differently than the Kubrick/Clarke endeavor. 2001 had the super computer, Hal. Dark Star had, I guess we could call them, ‘smart bombs.’  The crewmen would talk to the bombs (they were interstellar detonation devices), ask how they were doing, and ask them to arm themselves. Of course, one bomb developed a sort of self-awareness (due to none other than a human mistake) and ended up blasting the ship to bits along with one of the crewmen (oh, wait, two of the crewmen: one was in cryo-freeze).

Speaking of cryo-freeze, John Carpenter also capitalized on another theme from another SF great: Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel, Ubik, in which talking to individuals in cryo-freeze was part of the narrative.

The absolute best part of the entire film, besides Lt. Doolittle surfing into the atmosphere of the planet they were going to blow up ontop of a surfboard of spacecraft debris, was the gas-bag alien that Sgt. Pinback had an extended scene with.

This gas-bag alien was just an orange beach ball, probably 2 feet in diameter, that someone airbrushed a bunch of brown spots onto, and attached monster feet to. The gas-bag alien was unusually nimble and dextrous, able to move around quickly and in tight quarters. It also was quite smart and led Sgt. Pinback almost to his own death.

It is props like this that make the not-so-special effects in this film remarkable. It’s pure. It’s unadulterated. It’s silly. It’s brilliant. It’s simple.

There isn’t much to say analytically about this film other than to point out that Carpenter appropriated elements from other successful SF texts into this one. As far as the plot and dialogue goes, it was a relatively simple film. But it induced a lot of laughs and stupefied moments of perplexity.

A brilliant decision, really, to do this film. All the elements of a good, Italian WWII film are there. Spike Lee gets a thumbs up.  Oh wait, did I forget to mention the scene in which the female Italian love-interest (Renata) takes off her shirt while doing the laundry on the hillside?  And that she takes off her shirt knowing the soldier (Stamps) is right there watching her?

C’mon, Mr. Lee! Give us a break!  And by ‘us,’ I mean, those of us with a passion for non-gratuitous nudity in filmmaking, especially when you’re attempting to parallel a “real” Italian filmmaking syle.  You tried, okay. You tried. You did better than Clint Eastwood did with High Plains Drifter (1973), when he attempted to pilfer elements of Sergio Leone’s brilliant Dollars Trilogy; he pilfered poorly, very poorly. But, Mr. Lee, to just throw in a topless scene with one soldier, and then to have the same character actually have sex with another soldier (Bishop)???  Oh, it’s a blasphemy across the face of all that is decent! The inclusion of these elements dramatically cheapened the film.

The film has laudable qualities. I will admit that. But even a little piss in a 50-gallon tank of water will make the whole darn thing non-potable. Remember that.

The opening credits of the film really get you excited because the music is done by Pink Floyd, there’s some Grateful Dead apparently….  But in actuality, while the film does have moments of perfectly placed tunes, it’s also ironically devoid of a lot of extradiegetic music. A bit of a let down if you ask me.

The story itself is interesting enough. Boy struggles with revolutionary ideas. Girl’s just trying to make rent, ‘dig.’ Boy and girl meet in the weirdest way possible. Boy and girl bump-and-grind in the gypsum. Depart on their merry ways. Boy dies in a final act of repentant rebellion. Girl has a realization about consumption and ‘blows up’ (haha) her myths about wealth, etc.

The trailer says “Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point” about 10 times in a very serious tone. I actually like how Michelangelo Antonioni attempted to make an Italian film in America. But, to be honest, it just doesn’t pack the same punch as say L’Avventura, or even Blow Up.

I think this film was trying to convey a sense that people are generally in personal turmoil: vacillating back and forth in their decisions about the way(s) they should live their lives. I can relate. It’s not just an easy decision to do this or that; things are more complicated. You can have it in you to steal a plane and paint breasts and phalloi on it, but you can also have it in you to return the plane.  You can have it in you to work as a personal secretary to a C.E.O. to pay the rent, ‘dig,’ but you can also have it in you to choose to not buy into the conspicuous consumption of the rest of America with its manifest destiny and all that.  I get it.

You can and should be both, dig?!

I like that they put it into animation form, at least. Change the characters into non-humans, okay, but still give us Frodo, and the plotlines from LOTR and The Matrix and even WALL-E, and scores of other texts.  Still give us religous zealots who pervert ethics and morals. Still give us the dark, post-nuclear metaphor.  Is it even metaphor anymore? At some point this metaphor has transcended into something else because the C.I. has presented it to us so many times it has lost its original intent as metaphor or allegory. What is it? I don’t know. Falling on deaf ears, perhaps.  And by deaf I mean dumb.

It’s so sweet and romantic: the human soul that is the key to the survival of humanity. It’s also obvious.  But the world won’t remember us when we’re gone. It won’t care. And a memory of the fragments of the human soul can’t nourish the planet, like rain. Rain nourishes like rain.

Something that sticks out in this film, however, is that there is only ONE female character: #7 (Jennifer Connelly).  She’s the most agile one; the one who kicks the most butt. The one who comes in and saves the day in a narrative otherwise completely dominated by the male perspective.

I think perhaps the message I can glean from this film is that a world full of men caused the problem(?). That comes with a lot of baggage. The film also presents us with no solution, really, but to wait for life to start itself over(?).  Perhaps it is trying to tell us not to do this to ourselves in the first place. This would be obvious. But then again, maybe I am expecting too much from filmmakers. Metaphor is perhaps cliche and outdated.  Allusion is more appropriate perhaps:  all I know is that Frodo went into the fiery forge, Neo and the Architect were there in spirit, and WALL-E was left to pick up the pieces.  Oh yeah, and the flying, scouting machine had Edward’s Scissors-hands for a mouth. Thanks, Mr. Burton.

I’d like to start out with the absurdities of the characterization of Julian (Richard Gere). Julian is presented as a high-rolling gigolo, able to speak “five or six” languages (though he doesn’t even affect an accent when he’s speaking French), able to spend three hours bringing the aging Mrs. Represseds out of their sexual shells. He is someone who has all the right connections at all the classy L.A. restaurants and bars, and he is the “only one” who can get into the most exclusive country clubs in L.A.  That’s wonderful. Truly wonderful. But as I’m sitting there watching it unfold, I’m wondering to myself about a few things: why is prostitution being glamourized, why does Julian have so much credibility, and with so many “return-tricks” in high society, how is Julian not caught/ how are all the women he is hired by not shamed by their associations with him (they all seem to know who else he hooks up with)? He’s just that cool, I guess.

He’s also cool enough to school Detective Sunday (Hector Elizondo) in the art of dressing up for the ladies, and the Detective even listens to his advice. I’m just wondering about the reality of a high-class hooker maintaining his ethos with so many people in this way. My point is that it’s just not that believable. He’s a “whore,” as the Senator points out.

Speaking of the Senator, one of the scenes that really bothered me was the scene at the country club when Julian confronts the Senator (or vice versa). If you notice, it is the Senator who goes after Julian; it is the Senator who follows Julian around, not vice versa. One would think that a Senator wouldn’t be the one to go following a gigolo around like a puppy dog whining about his wife. I suppose this scene both disappointed me and reinforced the message being conveyed about Julian: that he has something about him that sets him “above” the norm. He even says to Detective Sunday at one point that there are some people who are “above the law.” I suppose he was referencing himself. But, as the narrative progressed to the climax of the story (I would categorize this as the scenes dealing with his realization that the jewels were planted in his car, leading up to the confrontation with Leon), the viewer is treated to a classic peripatetic moment.

Julian’s true reversal of fortune was when he actually kills someone. Up until that point, he hadn’t done anything wrong. He was being set up, and then it went terribly wrong.  Poor Julian.

I suppose the biggest let-down of this film was that in the final scene, when he is across the jailhouse glass from Michelle (Lauren Hutton), and she says she told the truth so she could be his alibi for the night of the murder, the film ends awkwardly with Julian’s sappy comment about not believing he had to come this far to get to her. Gag me with a spoon. Not only is there no resolution to the case itself, nor the general problems associated with a Senator’s wife dating a gigolo, but the viewer is left with the message that ‘love conquers all’ or something like that.

I’m too smart for that.

Rather than ‘love conquers all,’ this film says to me: it’s okay to be a whore if you’re public image portrays an air of higher class.  I mean, Julian technically ‘tricked’ in not only the “clean” environs of the country club ladies and the Senator’s wife, but also in the very bizarro worlds of Leon and Mr./Mrs. Rheiman (she did not look truly conscious to me when he had that encounter), and yet he did it anyway.  So, all the glamour of the suits and the stereos and the Mercedez Benz can’t possibly balance out against the sometimes gruesome service he is performing for money.

I guess I’m failing to see the overall point of this film. I think they were trying to say it’s hip to be a gigolo. But then I also think they were saying even gigolos get the blues. When all is said and done, I think Paul Schrader and Jerry Bruckheimer could’ve made a better film with what they had.

Though it does remind me of that old jazz standard, “Just a Gigolo”:  ”when the end comes I know they’ll say I’m just a gigolo…life goes on without me….” (I’m thinking of the Marty Grosz version).

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I try to diversify my viewing habits and hope that my audience has gotten some pleasure from reading my analyses.

Here’s to an intellectually prosperous second year, dear Cinematophiliac!

Back to the main event. So Last Year at Marienbad was recommended to me because it was supposed to be relevant to my studies of Muriel Spark’s novel, The Public Image (1968). Now, I’m not going to get into much detail about that but I would like to point out that waiting two and a half years to watch something (that was made in 1961) is a long time, and when the climactic moment arrives when the film shows up at my doorstep (albeit WAY late to include in my analysis of the novel…two and a half years ago….), it is reasonable to think that the film would be relevant. But it’s not. It’s not relevant in terms of direct narrative comparison, only tangentially based on certain theoretical principals…which may work for some people).  I’ve read and studied Muriel Spark’s The Public Image a lot.  I should know. Though I do not claim to be a Spark scholar or anything.

Last Year at Marienbad is a film about memory and perception of reality. It has elements of the postmodern because of its repetition and the way the repetition discombobulates the viewer’s understanding of the broken narrative. The Public Image has elements of the postmodern because of its exploitation of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and because of Spark’s use of Baudrillard’s/Plato’s simulacrum. Now, I suppose, on a purely theoretical level, we could make the very long stretch that Last Year at Marienbad is capitalizing on the concept of the simulacrum in that memories are themselves simulacra of real events. This, I can buy. In that way, the two films are tangentially related. But in Last Year at Marienbad, the memories of the main characters are inexact and fluctuating; they are not exact copies.

One thing I’d like to point out is that as I was watching this film, I thought of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, The Shining (1980). The big hotel with all of the bourgeois guests, and the feeling that perhaps people are stuck in memories, or insanity, is something I felt was ever present in Last Year at Marienbad. At the very least, I assume Kubrick probably saw this film. There was also an ever-present theme of inadequate communication (because of the way the viewer was treated to only parts of conversations, picking up only random portions of what the other hotel guests were saying as if you were walking through the rooms too quickly to hear more than a sentence or two) and I couldn’t help but think of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series, especially with the White/Black Lodge sequences of bizarro communication. I will, however, admit that this idea of inadequate communication was part of my analysis of Spark’s novel, via Fellini’s La dolce vita, in terms of Marcello’s difficulties communicating with Paola in the end.  But I still stand true to my original assessment that this film would not be a text of primary comparison with the novel.

Aside from my general disappointment that this film was not, in fact, related directly to my prior studies, I found it to be one of the most cinematographically spectacular films I’ve seen in a long time. The framing of the shots was magnificent because of the interior and exterior architecture and design of the setting. For instance, one of the most visually appealing shots was out on the grounds, with shadows and shapes abounding, looking much like a painting (see this shot on The Criterion Collection‘s page for the film) with its balance, and yet almost surreal structure. Also, one scene, when the man and woman are walking through the hallway, is framed perfectly with not only the design in the carpet but also with the walls and the corridor/hallway itself.

This is not a film to be watched when tired. It is slow, repetitive, and unresolved in the end. Perhaps this is another tangential correlation to Spark’s The Public Image, as the novel also ends ambiguously. But Last Year at Marienbad begins ambiguously, ends ambiguously, and everything in between is ambiguous because of the uncertainty of memory. I suppose the serious message we might be getting from Alain Resnais in this film is that memories, even if they are only 1 year old, can be treacherous and dependent on our perception of reality at the time of the making of the memory and at the time of our retrieving of the memory. That the man can’t recall if he raped the woman is disturbing. That the woman can’t recall the man at all is disturbing. That the viewer is left unsure of any of it is disturbing. Resnais is definitely wanting his viewers to think, and this is good.

In regards to the wrestling match, I will hand it to Aronofsky for ‘preparing’ the viewer for the brutality by showing a prior match where The Ram cuts himself on the head so he will bleed, and so the match will appear more real. Well, it was real blood, so it was real, but there was still an element of staged spectacle in that match. Nonetheless, it was real blood, and it was a precursor to the later, more brutal scene with the Hillbilly. Even before the actual scene comes, Aronofsky once again attempts to prepare the viewer for what’s to come by having the Hillbilly ask The Ram if  a staple gun is okay to use during the match. So the viewer is thinking it’ll just be a staple gun.  But, it isn’t. It’s much worse. And the lengths to which both wrestlers were willing to go for the spectacle (or in The Ram’s case, for the love of his audience) are truly pitiful. The viewer gets the same feeling about this scene, as he/she does with some of the terrible scenes in Requiem for a Dream when we get to witness the lengths to which Marion (Jennifer Connoly) will go for her heroine. Both scenes show the exploitation of the body for a gain in some way. Both scenes show moments of human desperation. Both scenes invoke, in the viewer, a sense of pity for the character(s) involved.  Marion exploited herself for heroine and The Ram exploited himself for audience admiration. I mean, that’s fine and all, if that’s your thing, but to watch it unfold should remind the viewer that life isn’t all peaches and cream for everyone.

The second scene, in the Deli when Randy-as-Robin is recognized by the customer and he is going back and forth getting the potato salad amount perfect for the old lady, is a reminder to the viewer that Randy is self-destructive by nature. His willingness to go to the extreme of slicing his own finger on the meat-cutting machine as a rebellion against his past submission to the ridiculous authority of the grocery store manager (thus, as a metaphor for trying to hold down any real job) is a reminder that Randy The Ram is pretty much cut out for the wrestling circuit and all its self-destructive demands. It was icing on the cake that in classic The Ram style, Randy smears his own blood all over his face as he’s tearing his way through the store, making himself fierce, a fighter.  This is reminiscent of something you might see in Homer’s The Iliad with Ajax/Aias or Sarpedon blazing their way through a jungle of bodies, mowing them down, and wearing their victims’ blood as trophies.  In Randy’s case, his own blood is his trophy. A striking image, actually.

But!  I think Randy submitting to the authority of the sleazy grocery store manager (who clearly has a Napoleonic complex of sorts) is ultimately the same as submitting to the nature of the audience’s authority that a wrestler must accept when his impetus for success is ‘win the audience at all self-inflicted costs.’ Both are humiliating in their own ways, and both remind the viewer that there’s maybe no escaping getting caught under this machine.

Ultimately, it’s sad that Randy tries to reconnect with his daughter and she severs their relationship. And it’s sad that despite all the work it took Randy to get closer to Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), he still felt abandoned by her at the end: he looks up to see her, to seek acknowledgment from her, but she’s ‘always already’ gone (in his mind). He had nothing to live for but his fans and if he goes out in a blaze of glory, then so be it.

Aronofsky has made a lot of films that make you feel sorry for people, for their lives, for their decisions in life, for the predicaments they’re in. He shows you moments of desperation that are believable. He shows you the struggles of real people. I have a hard time believing there are real Jason Bournes or Mr & Mrs Smiths out there, but I can surely see the Randy The Rams out there, struggling day by day, trying to be happy and good, but falling way short and failing miserably.

The protagonist (and we know he’s the protagonist because he’s the first actor to appear onscreen), Daniel Plainview, is a loner. He has no one except the baby he claims as his own. But when the boy, H.W.,  loses his hearing, Plainview abandons him to a deaf school in San Francisco, and later when H.W. wants to go off to do his own thing, he admits the devastating truth to H.W. just to cause him pain. He is therefore selfish and seemingly heartless. He knows no compassion at all, except when it serves his selfish purposes (e.g. missing H.W., etc.). Plainview exhibits behavior, as the film progresses, that indicates he is also lonely, though he his surrounded by faithful friends (Fletcher, played by Ciaran Hinds….hail Caesar!) and his son.  At the arrival of his ‘brother,’ he is at first skeptical, but then takes him on like it were the natural thing to do, only to ultimately be disappointed and enraged by the man’s deception. His final treatment of his ‘brother’ shows how heartless he  is and how far away he is from having compassion for his fellow man. Same with the final scene with Eli at his home’s bowling lanes. He is heartless, and selfish, and out to make or keep whatever money he can.  He is also overly concerned with maintaining his perception of his dignity. Ironically, his seeming-antagonist, Eli, though the viewer might expect him to become Plainview’s nemesis, due to his own inability to deal with people on a truly human level, falls way short of keeping the force balanced.

Therefore, Daniel Plainview’s megalomaniacal personality goes unchecked. It was really disappointing to see Eli never really come through with any counter measures against Plainview. Perhaps this is what the director, Paul Thomas Anderson, wanted: to not be so predictable. Or perhaps it was of the utmost importance that Plainview be able to fully develop into the monster that he was.

I can’t help thinking of another great film with an ending and a protagonist very similar to this one: Patrick Bateman and American Psycho. These two films end very similarly, almost in a bizarre parallel universe sort of way: Patrick Bateman, after confessing his crimes, finds that his crimes are overlooked and his peers don’t seem to care that he is a psycho killer (though it is debatable as to whether Bateman really was a psycho killer, or whether it was all in his head, but that’s a topic for another day, right E.D.?!); Daniel Plainview, as the film draws to a close, after bashing Eli’s head in with a bowling pin, tells his assistant/butler, who DOES NOT register a shock at the sight of the crime, that he’s all done with his dinner. The viewer must surmise that the butler will merely clean up the body with the dishes and that will be the end of it. Yes? No?  The film ends with the viewer wondering how on earth this is not going to end badly for Plainview, in a going-to-prison sort of way. But then we think of Patrick Bateman and perhaps we know what will happen: nothing. Nothing because sometimes megalomania goes unchecked. Sometimes people want to keep their jobs.

If Plainview represents the American Dream (that pull yourself up from the bootstraps and drag your  mangled ass across miles of desert for the possibility of getting rich sort of thing), and if the American Dream requires you to do whatever it takes to make it to the top, including murder (and dragging your ass…) then it is reasonable to surmise that Plainview is representative of all of the Capitalist moguls and tycoons and robber barons who have exploited all the resources they could in order to grace the Society and Financial pages.

But I think that’s too simple. Honestly, the film can’t just be about how ridiculous it is that super rich capitalists can get away with anything and everything just because they worked hard to make their millions/billions. I mean, really?!  Could it be that simple?

I mean, Eli was an insufficient nemesis. There was no real nemesis to counter Plainview’s hubris. Even Standard Oil couldn’t give Plainview a tear in his stockings. There were NO checks or balances. Not even God, in this film, could really counteract Plainview. I mean, he’s in plain view! He’s right there. Somebody do something! But no. Nope. Everyone was weak.

I suppose we should consider the title: There Will Be Blood. Blood will be shed. Guaranteed. Not, There Might Be Blood.

As a viewer, I had higher hopes for Eli in terms of his nemesis potential, despite his inherent weakness as a human being.

Finally, the extradiegetic music in this film was very persistent in its setting of the mood as somber, dangerous, and high-anxiety. Even with a simple pan across a train station when no narrative action was presumed to be taking place, there would be music indicating impending danger. One must suppose that the point of this was to lead the viewer to believe that the whole scenario was fraught with danger.

Danger! There will be blood shed! Danger!

Hmmm…Thompson definitely tried to take this narrative and show us something. I’m just not sure it was something profound. Perhaps I haven’t thunk on it hard enough.

“Michelle Obama wearing shorts proved too much for the media.”

I think the implications of such a news ‘story’ sum up the film, Network, pretty well.  Though I’m very weary of jumping to the conclusion that Network is a film that accurately reflects today’s media sentiments. I jumped to this same false conclusion when I first started reading The Grapes of Wrath (in terms of economic depression, now and then), and by the time I was finished with the novel, I realized I had grossly overcalculated the resemblance between America’s depression in the 1930s, and the economic ‘crisis’ being experienced in 2008/2009.

This film reminded me a lot of Requiem for a Dream (2000) in that Darren Aronofsky also latched onto the intoxicating virtues of television, and the way the medium of television can be used to mesmerize individuals. And not just mesmerize, but completely take over. Videodrome (1983) is also another film that comes to mind.  I think all of these films would make George Orwell proud. Or distraught.

Network really makes me think about the idea that certain entities in our modern times go completely unchecked (n.b. I plan to write more about this in my next post on There Will Be Blood). It goes without saying that the lengths to which the network executives go to accomplish their goals (usually associated with self-preservation) are completely immoral. The final result of the film is a clear sign of this: when they decide to “axe” Beale live on his television program.  But why would professional business executives in a mainstream market first of all consider, but then actually end up implementing, such a drastic plan? Is it JUST greed? Is it greed and power? Is it status? Is it success?

Looking back throughout the film, I think one of the most disturbed, and also one of the most important, characters in this whole story was Diana (Faye Dunaway) because throughout the entire narrative  she is shown and described as someone who only thinks in terms of being able to relate real-world scenarios to fictional television/film scripts. She does not ‘live’ in the real world; she lives in a world where everything can be turned into a screenplay. Even her love affair with Max (Wm. Holden) is described to Max’s wife as a predictable plot that will unfold in one of a few inevitable, standard plotlines. I would say that Diana represents the true heart of the problem: a detachment from reality that leads to an ultimate justification for immoral action in real life. Diana’s detachment from reality, and her completely numb way of living life (she feels nothing and just goes through the motions, even with her lover), are reminders that despite the existence of the slimy network executive, Hackett (Robert Duvall), who everyone  would expect to make immoral decisions, the true problem exists with the Dianas of the world.

So? What does that leave us with? Well, this is where films like Requiem for a Dream come in to help because it is that same detachment from reality that allows people to get sucked in and mesmerized by the intoxicating nature of television. In Requiem, Mrs. Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn) went down a very disturbing rabbit hole of diet pill/drug use, in addition to becoming obsessed with a television personality. The viewer, watching it all unfold, could only shake his or her head and say: Man, people trust the TV (and the medical community) too much, and look where it gets them…in very pitiful places! The same with the other characters in that film: Requiem leaves you with an awful feeling in your stomach for all of the characters involved. Addiction to whatever substance or idea you might be obsessed with is only going to cause suffering or death (in the worst case, I guess). With Network, it reminds us that what’s ON the TV, and what’s BEHIND the TV are aren’t always educational, or therapeutic, or informational. Sometimes it’s a vast ‘network’ of Dianas and Hacketts and others whose sole intent is to push their own agendas of power, greed, success, or whatever it TRULY is that they’re doing in their executive offices.

I won’t consider the obvious conspiratorial aspect of the broader context of network executives and their goals to take over the minds of the masses, and what they plan to do with us once they’ve finally hot-synced all of our brains with their motherboards (though we might be safe in our assumption that perhaps it has already happened). I’m more concerned here with the degree to which the Dianas of the world, the truly diluted (the Inner Party members, if you will), have a hand in making or breaking individual lives. There will always be masses of soft brains to manipulate, and the general public is going to be coerced into just about anything. But, it’s the Dianas that are the more interesting to think about, and how, on an individual basis, people’s lives are destroyed as a result.  I guess I’m making a distinction between Diana and Hackett, and individuals versus the masses.

The film, Network, presents us with both a view of the masses (the scenes of everyone screaming out of their windows “…I’m not gonna take it anymore…” or the television audiences), and of individuals. But it is on that individual basis that the film seems to be focused. There is no specific concern about the masses, only that the masses are the target audience that will keep the network machine running.  But individuals’ lives are ruined, and that’s what the viewer gets to see.  There is a sense that one-by-one, humanity is being destroyed by the forces behind corporate, conglomerate television.

In the meantime, I guess I’ll just sit back, drink my Victory Gin, and rant my Two Minutes Hate while tuning in to see what happens next on TLC’s hit reality show.

It was a long film: 2 and a half hours. But there was a lot to be shown. I think what stands out to me most in this film is the depiction of the ravages of war and nationalism/patriotism on humanity. But let’s face it: we are all now used to seeing images of Nazi war crimes being played out for us on the screen. We are no strangers to the firing squad and the looting of Jewish riches by Nazi soldiers.  This is certainly at the heart of the Jewish distaste over any recreation of Holocaust imagery: to try to is, in itself, a blasphemy against the atrocities and suffering. But, Nazi-era films keep coming out. So there must be a Hitler or a budding SS in our midst that someone’s trying to allegorize for our collective subconscious to clue into.

Back to my point about depicting humanity’s deep plunge into the absurdly unethical in times of war: Though we are used to “seeing” the Nazi crimes, in this film we also are treated to what happens when the Nazis leave Holland, and the Dutch are left to punish their own traitors. They are just as brutal and inhumane to those who they feel betrayed Holland and sided with the Nazis. The point is that nationalism is nationalism is nationalism, and none of it works very well if you’re trying to maintain a sense of ethics and compassion for your fellow man.

Luckily, we have a few characters who are able to bridge the gap between all the patriotic-war-games-hoopla, and see each other for who they were: Rachel Stein and Muntze. Love, the great equalizer, made their relationship work, but it was also what ultimately brought them to suffer more. It’s amazing that in this film, Muntze, the highest-ranking Stasi, is able to fall in love with a woman he knows to be Jewish. Even more amazing is that Rachel is able to be honest with him, on quite a few occasions, when the viewer is thinking: don’t tell him that! But she is a symbol of purity and her character is the reason the film works: because without her as a gauge to show the atrocious behavior of the others, we might just have a lot of killing to watch.  And Muntze is the same: who would have expected a compassionate Stasi official?

I think films like these remind us that even in the midst of chaos, we can stay true to ourselves, to reason, to reasonableness, and to ethical behavior.

It is interesting that the film is framed around Rachel’s flashback of the events of her youth because later in life, it must have been in the 60s or so, she is in Israel on a Kibbutz, and as the film ends and she is walking back through the barbed wire with her husband and kids, there is another war going on around her. Clearly we know what war this is: between Jewish Israelis and Arab Palestinians. Clearly we know that we are supposed to make the connection between the Nazis in Holland and the final scene. This can be taken several ways. It’s hard to tell what Verhoeven was getting at. But like most films, we bring to the final meaning what we want to, and sometimes we want to leave it open because there are no simple explanations or solutions. But with a good film, a well made film, a smart film, we can go back through the film to fill in the blanks left open for us in the end.

Anna walks up to her father, after he has found out about some political happenings that did not go their way:  he is staring out the window, contemplative; she slowly walks up to him and reaches out to hold his hand. It is at this moment that the viewer sees real solidarity happening. Clearly, Anna cannot know what group solidarity means until she can accomplish the first hurdle of being understanding and compassionate toward just one person. This, after her parents have dragged her through the emotional ringer by completely shocking her sense of sensibility when it comes to thrusting her into a world of revolutionaries, communist sympathizers, and an end to her bourgeois lifestyle.

The film closes, a bit cliche, with her walking amongst the “public school” kids, intermixing.

This film shows us that though we may struggle against change, if we can learn on our own to show true compassion for one, we are more likely to show it naturally for more-than-one; rather than being forced to for some idealism we can’t even comprehend.  Hmm….

What I found throughout this film is a lack of support for a lot of Bill Maher’s “Biblical (or other religious textual) evidence.” There were countless scenes in which Maher was saying to people “such and such is in the Bible” and the people would say, “no, i believe it said this,” and he would say, “no, that’s not in there.”  But he didn’t carry a Bible or a Qu’ran or anything else with him to “show” anything. There were only a handful of times in which he actually provided quotes from religious texts in order to support his argument–he could have either shown the quotes to the people he was talking to, or presented them as titles for the viewer. Otherwise, his lack of consistently doing this severely affected his ethos in my opinion and it severely diminishes the overall quality of this film.

He attempts to make some good points in this film but I fail to see the point if you don’t do it right.

I’m not sure what’s worse: the pedophiliac tendencies of Humbert Humbert (can’t help but think: Pervert Pervert) or the manipulative, woman-charms of Lolita. They’re both sick and liable in their joint and severable ways.

I think what is most disturbing about Kubrick’s depiction of these characters is how everyday it is presented. Humbert didn’t look like a pedophile; Lolita necessarily didn’t look like a girl who would be playing two much older men in the ways she did (she’s pretty but she isn’t a traditional Vamp).  Humbert didn’t have to do much to seduce Lolita, nor she him. It just naturally fell into place for the both of them. (Un)Lucky for her, she had that cuckoo mother to serve as a poor sexual role model, and due to her mother’s yip-yappy ways with men, poor ole Lolita didn’t have the wherewithal to keep herself out of the murky grime of adult relations.

But, clearly, Humbert was crazy.  As the framing scenes depict, he shows up to kill Clare Quilty, armed with a poem that Lolita supposedly had written about how Quilty stole her innocence. Well, no, Lolita didn’t write it. Humbert did. Talk about obsession: killing the man who led her away and destroyed it for him….  Well, it was always already over for Humbert.

Honestly, it’s this kind of film that gets you right in the pit of your stomach because of the way Humbert not only pursued Lolita, but also because of the ways in which his obsession progressed. It’s quite sick to think that the society around Humbert and Lolita (when they moved to Ohio) “knew” that something was going on between them (i.e. the neighbor told him), but it went on without any sort of intervention to speak of.  Even Quilty could have called the cops–he had inside information about a step-father and his incestuous step-daughter. But no!  Quilty was just as much of a pedophiliac Humbert was.  Just because Lolita was a willing participant in their relationship doesn’t mean she had all her wits about her–because she was so young. I say this knowing full well that she purposely manipulated Humbert with Quilty’s help. Clearly, Lolita had problems and a warped sense of reality, or she wouldn’t have played the masquerade.  But Humbert was too obsessed with possessing her to notice he never had gotten much of a real grip on her to begin with.

Kubrick presents a sick option here: one that is disturbing; one that reminds us that all kinds of things happen with people in this world; one that insists we look at the willingness of Lolita, the obsession of Humbert, and the manipulation of Quilty, all as facets of a world sick with sexual exploitation.  Humbert and Quilty get a major thumbs down.

The two characters in the film, whose names change frequently, are young bohemian women. They live free. They take advantage when life presents opportunities for them. They don’t specifically look for trouble, but they also don’t stop to think about the repercussions of their actions before they act. They are young. They are free. They trick old men into buying them elaborate, extravagant lunches, they are ego-centric and attention-getting, and they are apparently on a path to destruction.

Throughout the film, I viewed them as scavengers: taking what they could get, scrounging around into every nook and cranny trying to find a free ride or a free lunch, breaking into places they shouldn’t be and making the most out of what they found.

By the end, Chytilova “gives” them a conscience and this is interesting because they are characters in a film that are created anyway. But rather than letting the narrative take the viewer through the plot naturally (to see the ‘real’ consequences to their actions), Chytilova lets them fall (metaphorically and physically) but she also gives the viewer a glimpse of “what if they rectified their selfish behavior.” The end of the film is definitely an interesting statement on sometimes when you gorge yourself on others’ bounty, you really screw yourself with no hope of redemption (because the filmmaker. a.k.a. ‘God’ has the upper hand).

These two girls, I suppose, represent the difference between being young and irresponsible, and older and responsible. There is a shift between these two for everyone. There is a time in everyone’s lives when they truly do not realize the repercussions of their actions. And then one day they realize.  And then they are “closer” to being an adult.

But what’s so bad about staying young and irresponsible? Well, that’s easy: when the people around you are the ones footing the bill, nobody will want to be around you anymore. 

But it’s not that simple with this film.

In the case of this film, I’d say youth (and its corresponding freewheeling irresponsibility) was eradicated without any attempt to reform or educate.  And that’s never a good thing.  You can’t just let a chandelier crash on their heads after they tried to right their wrongs. I suppose Chytilova’s point is clear: you have to nurture creativity and youthful energy, and not try to eradicate it if it’s not going exactly your way. This must relate in some way to her experiences making films in a state-controlled environment. 

That makes a lot more sense than just getting rid of the young and irresponsible.

I’m not quite sure what the point of Blue Velvet was, other than to show some secrets of small-town living, but I think Lynch must just like showing aberrant behavior on film.

What do I want to say about this film? It was interesting.  It was violent. It was kooky.  It was bizarre. 

Ultimately, it was “okay.”  I think film viewers and connoisseurs enjoy kooky.

One thing the viewer can see more readily by watching this film is Lynch’s style. It’s hard to be certain within a TV series like Twin Peaks, but there are certain elements in both texts that give the viewer a better glimpse at his style.

For instance, the night club/bar and strange singers, the color red (or blue), the innocence vs. experience trope, the mystery to be solved (ironically by Kyle MacLachlan), drug use, and the aberrant sexual behavior trope.

I’m still laughing about Dennis Hopper’s character, Frank Booth, and his bizarre, Freudian sexual fantasy.  …what on earth?!

The film almost follows the plotline perfectly. There are a few mixings-around of narrative action, but that doesn’t specifically make this film a disappointment for me. What is disappointing to me is that THE MOST IMPORTANT SCENE OF THE FILM, THE END, IS ENTIRELY MISSING!  It ends on Ma saying how “We’re the people who live on” and all that jazz. Not really, Ma. You’re the people who might not live on. That was Steinbeck’s point. I’ve never seen such a blasphemous ending.

I mean, what’s there to cry about in this film???  The suffering of the Joad family is not developed enough to come anywhere near evoking that raw, human compassion that the reader feels. For instance, you never see the Joads struggling for food: they’re eating in half of the scenes!  Yes, granma and granpa die, Connie leaves, the other brother disappears (not even dealt with in the film, by the way), Casy is killed, etc.  But you don’t “see” the struggle.  This is my general beef with literature-to-film adaptations so I won’t bore you with more critiques of that.

I have to say that my other major critique of this film is the actors. Sorry, world-at-large.  My problem isn’t with Henry Fonda or John Carradine. It’s with Ma’s character, played by Jane Darwell. Of course, she won an academy award!  She just wasn’t believable as the matriarch of the Joad family. And I was less-than-impressed with her feigned Okie accent. And Rosasharn didn’t even have a Southern accent. Give me Vivien Leigh or give me Death!  But perhaps I’m being too critical with my own watered-down Southern accent. Though, I seem to have an affinity for disliking poor accents in films; Brad Pitt in Seven Years in Tibet comes to mind.

I guess I should have realized that they would never have put the final scene of the novel into film in 1940.  But why bother doing it at all if you’re not going to do it right?  Why pervert the point of the story? Pure blasphemy!

Actually, watching My Best Fiend really helps one to appreciate the evil genius of Kinski’s acting. As Woyzeck is drawing to a close, and Woyzeck is wielding the knife on his wife, Marie, as the viewer I know that although he is not stabbing her with the knife (there is some BRILLIANT camera work and acting going on because you can see him come down with the blade and at the last second turn his hand so as to not really stab!), he is still literally going through the motions with the same intensity as if he were really doing it.  The shots are slowed, the grimace is on his face for an extended period of time, and Marie is hanging limply in his arms, her hair in one of his hands, the knife in the other stabbing down.  Eva Mattes (Marie) must have had nerves of steel to trust Kinski that much. Really!

For me, this is one of the best aspects of Herzog’s filmmaking: capturing the focused intensity of the shot, whether it be waiting uncomfortably on someone’s face while they squirm because they think he’s going to turn it off but he’s really waiting to watch the subject squirm; or capturing Kinski-as-Woyzeck in the midst of murderous emotional release, slow and deliberate, watching the pain play out on Kinski’s animated face. 

I do wonder sometimes what makes Herzog choose a particular story to tell. And aside from the infidelity-murder plotline (not being of the most critical importance overall), I feel the more critical aspects of this film are clearly centered around Woyzeck’s relationship with the Doctor and the Captain. Both are using him, manipulating him. And eventually they manipulate him together (in a God-Satan-Job sort of way), ultimately setting into motion the death of Marie.

In The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Herzog is critiquing the educated, or the systems of education and medicine,  because of how Kaspar was “studied” and flaunted for everyone’s amusement and personal gain in the film.

In Woyzeck, Herzog seems to be showing the viewer a perverted system of science, where a selfish doctor is willing to deprive a man for months for his own scientific gain: he makes him eat only peas for 6 months so he can test certain things, like urine levels. And the Doctor constantly references his “theories” and he has a huge closet full of papers; presumably papers he’s written or read; presumably referencing the papers he plans to write using Woyzeck as his test subject.

I think Herzog is telling the viewer that people should not be scientific or social experiments. He told us this in Kaspar Hauser. Because when that happens, things go terribly wrong. 

You can’t force a man to eat only peas for six months and expect him to remain sane!

This film takes place in what looks like a nuclear fallout zone. I imagined the setting as Hiroshima, a year later. It’s pretty much a slum.  The viewer is only given a glimpse of the dirty, run-down fragments of a community: there are no wide shots of the surrounding facets of the slum, or the larger city in the distance.  This is fitting because the viewer is treated to only fragments of the characters’ diegetic lives. 

Without knowing Japanese, it’s hard for me to guess what “dodes’ka-den” would be translated as in English. The boy is mimicking driving a trolley, and it’s hard to come up with the onomatopoedic (is that a word?) equivalent of a trolley sound, so I’m correllating it to our  English train sound of “Chugga chugga chugga chugga choo choo.” It doesn’t matter other than just knowing that the boy is repeating it over and over as he’s acting like he’s the trolley conductor (he’s shell-shocked or mentally handicapped).  Bless his heart.

The film shows glimpses into the home lives of the various residents of this sector of the slum: interestingly, many of them are doing work from home, assembling various items to sell like hair brushes or fake flowers.  Some of them are drinking, some of them are fornicating, some of them are starving, some of them are washing clothes and gossiping, some of them are dying, some of them are already dead.

Perhaps the most intriguing character in the film is the guy who’s pretty much already dead: he walks around like a zombie, his eyes bugging out, bright and wide open, but the lights are turned off inside. As the film progresses, his estranged wife returns and she seeks forgiveness from him for cheating on him (presumably MANY years ago). But he registers nothing. He is already dead. Killed years ago by that ravenous beast, the she-wolf, whose lusty hearts saps men of all their strength.

It’s sad, actually, that he wastes his life away. He gave up.  Is he a waste of space? He makes no effort to even talk to her, nor to anyone else in the film. He just stares out into oblivion. It’s no way to live. It’s not living.

Same thing goes for the homeless man with the little boy: idiocy and poor parenting gets them into a real fine mess. Their days were consumed with trying to stay alive, and trying to keep themselves motivated to stay alive by fantasizing about building their dream house.  They struggled for survival every day and it did not work out very well in the end for the boy.

Some of the characters in this film struggle with their daily existences, minute-by minute-sometimes. The mother of the Trolley Freak, as he’s called by the taunting kids, is desperate to keep her son happy because he does not seem to realize he is different; the girl who makes the artificial flowers struggles just to stay awake so she can finish her task, all-the-while she is just a pound of flesh without any enjoyment in life whatsoever.

There are other characters who do not struggle quite as much, like the gossiping wives around the water spigot, or the two couples who seem to be “swingers,” or the old man who is a positive, compassionate influence in the community. 

So what do all of these characters have in common?  Why is Kurosawa making a film about the slums and the various people that are living there?  Honestly, I don’t know. But I’m going to make a guess.

I think we all exist within a community with our own individual sense of reality. We all arrive at this moment in our lives with baggage of various sizes and weights. We all have capabilities for success and failure.  Just because we are who we are right now does not mean others are right there with us, though they may be standing beside us in the literal sense. I think Kurosawa was showing the viewer a community where hardship, gossip, violence, love, sex, compassion, death, and longing are all a part of daily life, and though we may be experiencing bliss or pain in our own realities, those around us might be experiencing something similar to or completely different than us. 

I think we are supposed to watch a film like this (and I also think that the horrible film, Babel, was an attempt at this) and recognize that we are part of a community of men and women who, behind closed doors and out in the public eye, lead individual lives, but also lead lives that we are all subject to seeing if we bother to open our eyes to them.

Two of the best examples of this in the film are when the bike delivery boy keeps noticing the flower girl is pale, weak, and sickly looking, and how he knows that her uncle is overworking her. But every time he confronts her about this, he only takes it so far as to tell her she’s in bad shape, but he never does anything to help her. The viewer is thinking he will somehow rescue her. But each time, he rides off on his bike with a smile having only pointed out the obvious.  This comes back to bite him in the end (in a way) because she later stabs him as a proxy for her uncle raping her. 

Another example is when a burglar invaded the old man’s house and was about to walk away with his tools. The old man woke up and asked him to please not take his tools, but to take his money instead. He got up, gave him the money, and told him to come back if he needed more. Later, when the police caught the burglar, and the burglar confessed to the burglary, the old man denied ever having given him the money. 

The old man has a code of honor that I believe is highly valued by Kurosawa.  He was the only “old man” in the film, and he was always dressed traditionally, while the other men were dressed variously. A clear statement about old/new.  He was also the person that seemed to be able to alleviate various tensions in the film: like an old Sage.

Ultimately, I think this film was about paying attention to the world, and the people, around us.  And more than that, behaving compassionately in all that we do.

That’s possible, but not for everyone.

This film is really a lot more than just that but I can’t possibly fathom the film’s cultural meaning from a Japanese standpoint because I am not Japanese.

Now, I haven’t watched the 1940  Henry Fonda/John Ford film version yet because I like to read the book first and then watch the film, but I did just add it to the top of my Netflix queue.  But, I feel compelled to write about the novel right now because I just finished reading it this morning and it evoked a particular reaction in me.

I don’t know if I had the same reaction as every one else who has read this novel or not. The older I get, the more I realize how similar we all react to things. So what I say about this, or anything else I write about on this blog, is just what comes out: untainted, unfiltered.  

I’ll get to my point in a bit but I’d like to build up to it by explaining that the reason I picked this novel up at the Library was because it’s a classic and I’d never read it. I’ve started to feel ashamed lately because of my lack of experience reading some of our great American classics.  I didn’t specifically pick the book up because I thought it had some relevance to today’s “economic hard times” as we keep hearing on the news…now, after reading The Grapes of Wrath, I know the real hard times is yet to come, folks!  (A side effect of reading this novel is that you want to write in Okie dialect too).

But as soon as the novel began, I started seeing the connection between the state of affairs in the novel and what we’re experiencing today: big businesses and banks taking the land and livelihoods away from the American people in order to turn a bigger profit.    But by the end of the novel, in the last paragraph actually, it really hit home for me that we’re not any where near the level of desperation and human suffering that Steinbeck was describing. I know this for a few reasons.

I know this because we’re still taking vacations and planning weddings; we’re still shopping online for iTunes; we’re still filing sexual harassment lawsuits; we’re still protesting gay marriage rights; we’re still having parties at our houses and inviting friends and feeding them all night long.  

We’re nowhere near the level of desperation Steinbeck describes. I agree with you that that is an obvious statement. But until you’ve gone through the novel and you’ve let your imagination run wild with the characters and their plight, I think it’s too easy to say to yourself as a reader in 2009: the same thing’s happening now!

No, the same thing isn’t happening now. We keep hearing “these tough economic times” every time we turn around. Yeah, we are experiencing tough economic times. Yeah, many of us don’t have jobs or have jobs that don’t come close to paying the bills. Yeah, I know. I’m living it too.  But the connotation that the media is trying to convey with “these tough economic times” is something much more grande than we can fathom in 2009.

I know this because I know what Rose of Sharon did in that last paragraph of the novel, and I know what the penultimate chapter was foreshadowing. Don’t worry, I won’t give it away. In the paragraphs leading up to the final paragraph of the novel, I didn’t realize what was happening. I stopped and re-read it a few times before I got to the end because I couldn’t figure it out. Then, I finished the last paragraph and I knew.  And I cried. I can’t remember the last time I cried reading a novel. 

I cried first because of the beauty of human nature. And the confusing part became clear.  Then I cried because of my confusion and I realized that’s the difference between us and them: we can’t fathom it, and Rose of Sharon and Ma both knew what had to be done. 

Despite the 4-5 weeks it took me to read this 450 page novel (I won’t lie:  it’s long and it’s depressing, and that makes it hard to read for long durations), I made it to the end and found it to be one of the most beautiful novels I’ve ever read. At first, the rotating descriptive chapters are tedious because the reader hasn’t been brought thoroughly enough into the Joad Family story line yet.  But as the novel progresses, the descriptive chapters provide much-needed details and foreshadowing about the general state of affairs for migrants.  And by the penultimate chapter, it’s clear that it’s foreshadowing beyond the last words of the novel. It’s a lot like reading The Odyssey:  the narrative seemingly just ends without giving the reader the satisfaction of a truly happily-ever-after for Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus, but the reader has to recall the prophecies and the omens and then he or she will know what is to come for them, and the reader can take some peace from that because the end is known.

Steinbeck has done the same thing for his readers but his Odysseus and Penelope and Telemachus will not grow old on Ithaca, and that is part of the sadness and beauty of this novel. We do not know what will specifically happen with Tom, but we know what happened to Casy. We do not specifically know what will happen with the rest of the Joad family, but we know what the penultimate chapter foreshadows. And we do not know what will specifically become of Rose of Sharon but we know that she is the embodiment of all that is good and pure in the human soul. 

People relying on people who are in the same state of being as they are. People being good to others because they are good people, not because they’re being forced to for some ulterior motive.  People recognizing their own suffering in others and doing their best to assuage the pains of life.

This novel moralizes while also de-emphasizing the necessity for a fear of God. In fact, I think it is one of the best aspects of the book, and it is why Casy is in the narrative: to show that goodness and moral-ethical behavior do not have to be followed by God’s wrath. In fact, Steinbeck makes a point of showing that good judgment is just good judgment. (And there’s plenty of suffering for the living without having to worry about suffering after death).  And sometimes when wrong is being done to you, and you react in a way to protect yourself, bad things happen accidentally. I don’t think Steinbeck is justifying murder or violence; just the opposite. I think he’s justifying human behavior in the face of highly unethical treatment and oppression: the good, the bad, and the downright ugly.  I think he’s pointing out that if you push men to the brink, they will have no other choice (i.e. Tom) than to protect themselves, and at the same time, they will make the right choice (i.e. Rose of Sharon). When you’ve stripped man of his autonomy, you’ve opened up the can of worms on yourself; but when the can is empty, you’ll find the core of human nature. 

Steinbeck was writing about real people.  We’re not quite real yet.  Nope. Far from it.  But I know there are Roses of Sharon out there waiting in many of us.

This film was what it was: blockbuster action, shoot ‘em and kill ‘em and stab ‘em and slash ‘em. Was it good: yes. Was it bad: no. But, it was very disturbing somewhat late in the movie to hear a little kid in the theatre say “Why’d he shoot him?” When Wolverine took one of many bullets. Yes, I’m talking to you, you crazy viewing public who takes 6 year olds to movies like this…shame on you!  

What I’d like to say about this film deals with our current need for heroes. I thought frequently during the film about the TV show, Heroes. If we can channel Mr. Jameson’s theory about the ‘absent cause’ here, then I think we can begin to surmise that superhero stories/remakes/prequels are feeding into, and out of, our collective unconscious in a way that is trying to pretty much scream out at us that we need some dang heroes!  What’s the absent cause you say? Look at the black hole that was the last 8 years in this country and we can find lots of reasons to justify wanting to manifest real heroes.  

And, I further justify this theory because a major part of this film was centered around a corrupt Colonel who was torturing and experimenting on mutants for his own selfish gains, and at whatever cost necessary.  Hmm….

I’m not a big fan of the overpowering cacophony of machine guns coming from the surround sound system, or the actual shoot-em-up sequences that pervade the film. For instance, the first 10 minutes of the film is all killing. Wars and killing, killing and more wars. 

Why?!  Why?!  Why are we still killing?! Why do filmmakers make films with all that killing?! Why do audiences want to see all the killing?! We’re just falling further and further down the rabbit hole of numbness to real death. Dagnabbit!

It was good. I liked it. I’m not sure exactly what I liked about it other than it tugs on the viewer’s heartstrings and makes the viewer identify with the female protagonist’s point of view, although she is the most violent and least ethical characters in the film. Now, I wrote just now that she was the least ethical. Well, yes, she is because she kills people and sucks their blood. But she is also the MOST ethical in the film because of how she selflessly takes care of her friend. You get the same feeling when watching The Lives of Others.  You don’t want to identify with the Stasi spy but you are pulled into it because he is both sides of the same coin: Good and Bad; therefore, balanced. Same thing with this movie: you identify with her because she, like Kenny Rogers, knows when to hold ‘em….

The young girl, approximately age 12, is a vampire. Her name is Eli. The visual effects were sufficient for the film, and not over the top, and a few times the viewer is treated to a glimpse of Eli’s real age (maybe in her 60s). So the poor thing has been a vampire for probably almost 50 years. But, she’s stuck as a little girl (it’s hard not to think of Interview with a Vampire). That’s one of the things that makes you feel for her: the fact that she is mentally mature but not physically. The psychological toll that is being taken is probably excruciating. Perhaps that is why her companion at the beginning of the film is out doing the dirty work for her. The viewer can only guess who this person is: an old friend from her childhood, a brother, or someone else? But he’s old (in his 60s).  We’ll come back to this in a bit because clearly Eli needs someone to help her live.

Eli’s neighbor is Oscar and he’s a bit of a dweeb who doesn’t know how to stand up for himself so he gets beaten up a lot by the same old bullies. Eventually, Eli takes on the role of protectress and as the film closes, the viewer sees that Oscar and Eli are staying together. 

Because Eli helped Oscar with the bullies–I won’t reveal what happened but suffice it to say they won’t be bothering anyone else–Oscar clearly feels he owes her a major debt of gratitude.  And on the train in the last scene of the film, Oscar is sitting there tapping on a box (inside of which is Eli) using the morse code they started using earlier in the film.  While Eli protected Oscar in the only way she could, now Oscar is doing the same for her: by taking care of her. Is this love, or just friendship?  Is Oscar going to become the old man who was her companion earlier in the film?  Because he did some pretty gruesome things for Eli.

The film is both sad and happy: it’s good that Oscar didn’t have bullies anymore and that he finally had someone who loved him enough to help him. But it’s bad that in order for him to be free from his bullies, people had to die and now he may have signed away his life and freedom to take care of a perpetually-young 12-yr old vampire.  It’s good for Eli because she has someone to stay with and to take care of her.  But overall, their present and future reality is pretty grim because their relationship is founded on a mutual need for death.

But the other problem is that Oscar never learned to stick up for himself. He let someone else do it for him.  This is a problem in today’s world: we always try to rely on external things to justify or cope with incidents in our lives. But applying a vampire-salve on the wound of your bully problem is not going to fix your own mind and its ability to cope.  No, it’s not. It’s only going to mask the problem.  And another problem is that instead of trying to resolve the problem by having adults intervene with the bullying situation, Oscar opened up the stage for some murder most foul. This makes you think of other incidents when bullying went really wrong…Columbine, for instance. Those boys took lives because they were picked on, either because the adults didn’t care or because they didn’t feel confident enough to seek help from adults. 

So maybe this film is about the failure of adults to protect kids. 

The viewer, of course, has no idea how Eli became a vampire but clearly she was just a kid and someone wasn’t doing their job taking care of her.

Yeah, let’s blame it on the adults.

The film was actually pretty good.  The setting is an American military base in Canada that is doing nuclear experiments; there are some suspected and completely unexpected effects from the nuclear power experiments on the surrounding village and that gets the plot rolling.  It was interesting to watch this film because it embodied fear of Russia, fear of the unknown effects of radiation, and of course, the overpowering nature of LOVE.

As far as Russia goes, turns out the purpose of the nuclear experiments was to try to use the nuclear power to power a long-range radar that would scan Russia from the vantage point of Canada. As far as the fear of the unknown effects of radiation goes, these nuclear radar experiments had insanely unexpected results due to unrelated mind experiments that were already being done by a local professor. Turns out the professor inadvertently was able to tap into the surge in nuclear power being given off from the military base, and that caused the fiends to come into being.

The fiends were actually brains with tentacles, and the gory special effects were the brains spurting out blood. Not a lot of gruesome imagery by today’s standards, but nonetheless sweet.

And the icing on the cake was that two people (An American and a Canadian…Oh Ally, my Ally!) fell in love over a sea of mutant brain-fiend corpses!

My point is that the “birth” of Reeves’ character in this film is lamely similar to Neo’s pod-awakening in The Matrix. And, he’s a “savior” in both films.  I’m just saying that there oughta be some new ideas out there. 

Honestly, the main thing I wanted to say about this film is a critique of filmmaking today: when did our imaginations become so non-functioning that filmmakers stopped making movies with metaphors in them? This film had no subtext. It was all clear: change your dirty ways, Earthlings, or you’ll kill the planet. I mean, are we that stupid that we have to have it told to us literally? Where’s the metaphor? Where’s the allegory? Where’s the thinking hard about it to figure things out?

I know what you’re thinking: but they were using allegory when they had the aliens come to kill us. Not good enough.

This all stood out the most especially with all of the politicians and their poor decision-making skills, like the intent-to-torture and their idiotic decisions to attack the sphere and its protector. Clearly, the filmmakers have captured the idiocy of politicians with this.  Big surprise.

I guess what I’m saying here is that I’m disappointed that a filmmaker could type-cast Keanu Reeves using the Matrix model, and yet still make a crappy movie. 

Lame!

The Big Lebowski (1998): This film came highly recommended. And as the film’s opening titles were beginning, D was already quoting famous lines from it.  But as I’m sitting here wondering what to say about it, I’m stuck on the “Yeah it’s funny, but what else?” schtick. It’s not a GREAT movie: yeah, the characters are over-the-top; yeah, all kinds of unexpected things happen; yeah, there’s bowling and potsmoking and funny one-liners and naked chicks flying through the rafters. But, what else?  I think what sticks out to me the most (besides the naked chick) is how poorly Sobchack (Goodman) treats Donny (Buscemi) and how poor Donny dies in the end and his ashes are blown into the Dude’s face because Sobchack isn’t paying attention.  This seems to be his M.O.: he’s so focused on giving Donny a weird Nam-esque funeral that he doesn’t pay attention to the fact that Donny wasn’t in Nam, and that he’s basically perverting his ashes by strewing them on The Dude rather than in the Pacific. Something else that sticks out is how Sobchack is constantly bringing up Vietnam. He’s stuck in the past.  He’s ‘agro.’ He’s the reason The Dude gets into trouble. He brings The Dude down.  I suppose the story is what it is: two guys up to some antics because one is toxic and the other’s too laid back to do much about it.  They’re both modern Everymen in their own weird ways. One’s passive, one’s aggressive. One lets things happen to him, the other makes things happen. Which is worse? Who knows…..

Lars and the Real Girl (2007):  This is a really sad movie.  I couldn’t believe it, actually. I thought it would be funny but it evoked a kind of pitiful melancholy that I can only suppose its sole purpose was to make people cry.  I can certainly appreciate the sentiment: 27-year old adult male dealing with abandonment issues and finding comfort in his imagination. It was obviously touching that the entire town helped him through his trauma. But that’s not realistic. Only in the movies does that sort of thing happen. I was surprised that the director didn’t take the cliched approach to resolving Lars’ Fake Girl problem: he very well could have had the sister-in-law begin to give birth, and have some complications, to help snap Lars out of his fantasy world. Because it was ultimately Lars’ fear that his sister-in-law would die in child birth (because Lars’ own mother died that way, giving birth to him) that caused him to create Bianca.  But, instead, he let Lars act it out naturally in his own time. I suppose this is a testament to coming to terms with your own life problems, in your own time, rather than having people force a cure.   It was a decent movie. But, like I said, very sad. Too sad.

The Duchess (2008):  One can never tire of watching films about women suffering under the hands of oppressive husbands.  Well, actually, that’s not true. This film, though its main plot was clearly the tyranny of the patriarchal hegemony, was mostly about Freedom. I mean, that was the whole platform of The Duchess’s lover: freedom for all!  Yes, yes, yes. We need freedom.  Especially in 2008.  But who is subjecting us to such tyrannical rule today? I have my suspicions: media, government, our addiction to consumption. Can we escape those? No. Well, maybe a little, but not completely. The Duchess could not escape at all, or she would have suffered very dire consequences. She lived her entire life in that situation: with her husband’s lover under the same roof. Aren’t we supposed to see that and be outraged?  Aren’t we supposed to say: not ME!!!  I would NEVER!  But I have to look a little further than the confines of my little house to identify what I need to escape from for my freedom. I think this film was a good attempt, but I fail to see how it truly instilled an invocation to actually free yourself from tyranny. It seemed to give off the impression that you should sit still and look pretty. I suppose the film could just be about the poor Duchess’s life…but what would be the point of that?!

Cache (2005): This is a French film directed by Michael Haneke. Ironically, lately I seem to be reading/watching texts that deal with the history of French-African relations. I read Camus’ The Stranger, which is about a Frenchman killing an Arab in Algeria, and I watched another film on the subject of the French suppression of African troops, Camp De Thiaroye.  Cache is apparently about the bad history between the French and Algerians (North African Arabs).  It is a slow-moving film, which I don’t mind at all because many Italian films run slow so I’m used to that.  The plot is such: a French man, Georges, and his wife, Anne, are receiving videotapes of themselves from an unknown source. The tapes are just sort of watching them: the watcher wants them to know that he/she is watching them. But the tapes then begin to lead them to specific places, and eventually to an apartment where Georges encounters an Algerian man who Georges finally realizes is a boy he grew up with that his parents were going to adopt, but because Georges lied about the boy, he ended up getting shipped off to an orphanage to grow up, presumably, in miserable circumstances. By the end of the film, there is no resolution as to who was sending the tapes: the man or his son. But one of the MOST SHOCKING moments in cinema that I have ever seen occurs in this film.  I say this because I feel I am relatively desensitized to what we tend to see in fictional film.  Now, this is not to say that real images of shocking things wouldn’t make my jaw drop too (I’m thinking of such real footage as Faces of Death). I’m just saying that I don’t get shocked that often, and my jaw literally dropped and my eyes bugged out in one scene in particular in Cache.  I won’t give it away.  BUT, clearly the point was to exhibit the shocking after-effects of the French on the North African Algerians. Georges’ selfish history with his once, almost-brother is an allegory of the French and their history in Algeria. One gets a major sentiment of abandonment, and a desire to SHOW the ill effects of such, through this film. It was a very good film. I should research the French in Algeria and African in general to understand better what this filmmaker is trying to explore. But the raw meaning is clear, even without the history lesson.

I have watched other films and TV shows but, like always, I don’t write about everything. I mean, you don’t want to hear about Ping Pong Playa (2007) or The Gods Must Be Crazy 2 (1988)….

Now, I’m not opposed to period action films. There are some that I actually like, like Gladiator.  There are others I completely abhor, like Troy.

I became skeptical of the film from the moment I saw Colin Firth’s face appear on screen. I said to D, “Oh, it’s Mr. Darcy!”   And then I cringed at the thought of him wielding a sword and all that. It’s just hard to picture Colin Firth in this type of film, especially because he is getting older and his action sequences in the film showed a level of combat that was not up to par with what his character was purported to have. 

A highlight of the movie was the oil on Aishwara Rai’s body, which was very conveniently slathered all over her for one scene in particular: when they were climbing up the rock face, on their way to save the Little Caesar. She is beautiful; none can deny that.  But her feminine presence in the film was also predictable. When the  masked “Eastern” warrior is kicking more butt than everyone else, it’s bound to be a woman in disguise. No big surprise there.  Considering her prominent role in the film, and her uber superstar status in India, I’m actually quite surprised that she isn’t listed in the film description on Netflix. Strange indeed. She’s listed on the DVD cover….

The film ends on one of the cheesiest revelations ever: that Ambrosinus the philosopher/tutor (played by Ben Kingsley) is actually Merlin and the Little Caesar eventually changes his name to Pendragon (first name Uther for you non-die hard Arthuriad fans) and marries Ygraine (the little girl who gave him a suit of armor earlier in the film).  And, Uther and Ygraine, sire none other than the future King Arthur (who is there in the film in the last few moments talking to “Merlin”).  How sweet, and convenient to tie all that up in the last 60 seconds of the film.  It just felt a little forced.  For instance, they could’ve mentioned earlier in the film the little girl’s name was Ygraine…I don’t know…something.  Maybe I missed the clues other than the glaring “special sword of Julius Caesar” part, but by the time Caesar Romulus Augustus throws the sword into the stone, the final bit with “Merlin” comes on to reveal the “surprise.” 

I’m just wondering why they keep making King Arthur films. What is it in our collective unconscious that makes us want to reidentify with this mystical figure of lore? Are we truly desperate to constantly remind ourselves that our mythology has such figures as King Arthur? 

As a side note, but I will be getting to my point soon, Virgil was commissioned by Caesar Augustus to write The Aeneid (circa 19 B.C.E.). Caesar Augustus was Julius Caesar’s nephew and heir, and he wanted his lineage to be traced back directly to the Roman/Greek Gods; thereby proving that he was a god (and so was Julius Caesar). So he paid Virgil to do this by tracing the lineage of Caesar Augustus & the (then) future founders of Rome (Romulus & Remus) back to Aeneas (son of Troy), back to Aeneas’ goddess-mother Venus, and therefore proving Caesar Augustus’ god-heritage. Pretty simple and effectively done, albeit very obvious in its propaganda for Caesar Augustus’s godliness.

(By the way, if you haven’t seen the HBO series, Rome, you should check it out because it documents the murder of Julius Caesar and the rise of Octavian, a.k.a. Caesar Augustus. It’s a GREAT series. I can’t believe it’s off the air. Maybe one day they’ll bring it back.)

As The Last Legion ended, and I sat dumbfounded at the quick tying together of loose ends, I thought of  the propagandistic nature ofVirgil’s work.  Caesar Augustus wanted to prove his godliness so he used the most popular method available to him to do it: the epic poem.

My thought is that we, in the West, are in the midst of an identity crisis.  We don’t know what to do, where to turn, who to look up to. So we make films.  Our leaders, of late, have been more to the likes of Arthur’s evil incestuous bastard son, Mordred, and not upstanding and honorable like Arthur and his “line.”  So why do all of these Arthur films keep coming out?  Why are we trying to reidentify with Arthur so much now?  Arthur is a lot closer to us than the Roman/Greek gods were. So a film like Troy would not have had the purpose of trying to identify a modern audience with its likely-ancestors.  But Arthur is a Briton and we in America are basically British, once removed. So are we trying to connect ourselves somehow with King Arthur as a possible part of our history and lineage too?  The director of this film is American, not British. I think it’s possible. And it appears that the ultimate point of this film was to show King Arthur’s lineage, so I don’t think I’m too far off on this.

We’re struggling for heroes to believe in and identify with. And all the good ones are pretty much myth. So what do we do now?

I have to say that Ousmane Sembene, with Camp de Thiaroye, has presented the absolute best dramatically ironic film I have ever seen. As the film progresses, the viewer is struck by the clearly unstable environment the African infantrymen are in. They are not yet discharged from duty by the French, they are waiting on their pay and other benefits to be compensated, and they are continually challenging the authority of their French military superiors. I distinguish by saying ‘military superiors’ because rank is rank; but, we all know the French felt morally (and otherwise) superior to black Africans, and that is implied generally speaking. 

The first instance of their insubordination is when they refuse to eat the slop they’ve been served at the Camp. The second instance is when they “form a commando” to blackmail the Americans, by abducting and imprisoning a white American soldier, so they will let Sergeant Major Diatta go. The Americans had captured him for no other reason than “walking while black.” The ironic thing is that it was a black American soldier who found Diatta to be an intellectual nuisance. Luckily, later the black American soldier came to Diatta to apologize. I see the problem as being cultural displacement on the part of the American–he didn’t want to relate to Diatta so he beat him up and abducted him because he essentially wanted to distance himself from “the other” of his ancestry. 

As a side note, while the Americans were presented as warmongers, it was the French who were the clear Barbarians of this film.

The third and final insubordination was the worst: when the military officials tried to pull a fast one on the men by trying to give them half of the exchange rate for their pay, the men refused to take it and abducted the General (in the same way they had abducted the American soldier–by merely taking him over to one of the barrack houses and guarding him, without hurting him at all) as a way to put pressure on them to give them the right exchange rate. 

As these scenes are unfolding, something is very clear to the viewer: that the African infantrymen are, first of all,  good and moral men; second of all, they are men of integrity and camaraderie; third of all, despite being in the French infantry (and imprisoned in concentration camps for 2-3 years), they retained their old codes of honor OVER and above the code of honor (and rank) that was demanded of them from the French military. They were not ‘simple’ in the sense of stupid, but they were simple in that it was clear that once they got what they wanted, they’d give back what they’d taken as leverage or for bargaining power, and not think they’d done anything wrong.  And they would assume that all would be forgiven. This is actually an amazing way to live life: to not hold grudges, to be happy with standing up for yourself, and to know you are on the moral up-and-up because you are a good person who has given up so much and asked so little in return. 

But…when they abducted the General, they signed their own death warrants. When the General agrees to give them their expected rate of exchange, the mute soldier, Pays, knows he’s lying. So does the viewer. Pays, who is shell-shocked and who wears a Nazi helmet as a security blanket, is the only one who knows something bad is going to happen.  And, like Pays, the viewer is just as mute.  It is here that the dramatic irony begins its crescendo.  When night has fallen and all are asleep and anxiously awaiting the pay they are “due”, the viewer knows that some things are too good to be true.

The lights from tanks break through the darkness, and when he realizes what is happening, because he has been keeping watch on one of the watchtowers (well, he techically fell asleep up there because perhaps even HE didn’t realize the absurdity of the BIG LIE–see Hannah Arendt–that was about to happen to them) Pays runs around banging on the barracks trying to mutely explain with hand gestures that tanks are outside the fence, but no one believes him. WHO could believe that the French would murder outright its loyal infantrymen who had suffered in concentration camps for France, just because they wanted their pay?!  Just like, who could believe the BIG LIE of the Holocaust.  It’s still hard to fathom either. 

But the viewer knows, because like Pays, we have seen the tanks come up to and we can do nothing to help the men from their fate.

Before the men had gone to bed that night, they had had a big music gathering where everyone was singing and playing their make-shift instruments.  Like Pays, who looked into the eyes of the Devil and saw him as the liar and trickster that he was, the viewer watches the music gathering with an intense feeling of dread for their impending doom.  The thought that went through my mind during that scene was that at least they’d enjoyed their last evening on earth….

By the end, most of the African infantrymen were dead, and Sembene had made his point about the atrocities of the French with their racist colonial practices. 

The film closes with a new batch of African infantrymen loading onto a boat, waving goodbye to their family members, and the one good white French officer looking around for Sgt. Major Diatta. This unsuspecting French officer had no idea that when he left Camp de Thiaroye the day before, the General would blow it up that night. And he certainly had no idea that the new batch of recruits he was in charge of would be subject to the same fate if they didn’t comply with inequality.

The final shot of the film was powerful. Diatta’s uncle and cousin (to whom he was supposed to be betrothed) were waiting at the docks for him with 10 kilos of coffee for Diatta’s white, French wife and their child together, back in Paris. The French officer was going to deliver the package to her for Diatta.  Diatta’s uncle and cousin were looking around for Diatta, not knowing where he was, but standing there just the same. The ironic thing was that despite being betrothed to Diatta, his cousin was there to deliver the present for his wife and child. Ontop of the 10 kilo bag of coffee was a black doll for the child: a veritable symbol of acceptance of them as part of the family.  This compounds the atrocity. Black African family accepts white Frenchwoman into the family, but the white French (collectively) won’t accept Black Africans as part of the human family of equality. It’s more important to annihilate based on military and colonial principle than it is to show reasonableness based on the principle of compassion and understanding.

Goodness gracious.

The main thing I want to say about this film is that it has an interesting moral at the end. I haven’t read H.G. Wells’ original story so I don’t know if the film correlates with what he was getting at also, but I find it infinitely amusing that Humans were able to contaminate and exterminate the inhabitants of the Moon with a simple cold.   I say amusing not because I think it’s funny, because it’s not. But amusing because “we” have cross-contaminated many civilizations throughout the ages. Smallpox from the Americas back to Europe, syphyllis from Europe to the Americas (or maybe it was the other way around).  Regardless, the point is that this film (and its corresponding novel) documents the deleterious effects of our explorations and colonizations on the unknown. 

Mel Gibson’s film, Apocalypto, comes to mind because in the final shot of the film, the viewer knows what will happen. An “A” for dramatic irony for that one.  And, in First Men In The Moon, it is also the final moment of the film that reveals the secret, though this secret occured 60 years ago, not in the next hour. What I mean by this is that the Professor’s cold killed the Moon people 60 years ago; therefore the tragedy happened in the past, though the biggest travesty is that the Moon people are extinct for everyone in the “present.”  In the final shot of Apocalypto, the Mayan civilizations still have an hour before the Spanish/Portugese  arrive on shore, though they have no concept of who they are or what they’ll do to them.  Same thing with the Moon people. It was assumed that the Moon people were the threat to the Humans, but it was the other way around. Same thing with the Native Mayan tribes and the Spanish/Portugese.  

For both films, the sentiment is the same: apocalypse back then, or apocalypse now.  Either way, annihilation of culture means everyone loses out in the present.

Warning: Spoiler Alert!!!!!

On Season 2, Episode 9, the viewer learns who killed Laura Palmer. I had my hunch when her father’s hair turned white. I was right. But, of course, there are still 3 more discs and a film to get through so clearly the “who” isn’t limited to Mr. Palmer.  Well, we know Bob is involved. We know Bob jumps from person to person.  We just have to find out the more complicated “why,” as the Log Lady says.

And this is where the fun part comes in. What I realized, after watching Season 2 Episode 9, is that David Lynch has pretty much ripped off Haruki Murakami, the Japanese novelist. In 1982 he published A Wild Sheep Chase, which is the third in the “Trilogy of the Rat” series.  Twin Peaks aired in 1990 and 1991.

Now, for any die-hard David Lynch fans:  sit back, relax, and don’t have a cow, man.  Or in this case, a sheep!

In A Wild Sheep Chase, the protagonist is blackmailed into locating an individual sheep in the Japanese countryside. The sheep is special and definitely otherworldly.  The sheep posseses individuals (you have to “let” it in), it then controls and manipulates the individual’s life, and then leaves its host to find a new parasitic human inhabitant when the body of its host is deteriorating.  The thing is, when the sheep leaves you, you die, because in the meantime a huge brain tumor has developed in your head as a direct result of the sheep being inside of you.

Hmm…..

So I realized this was what Lynch was doing: taking the idea of Murakami’s mystical sheep and appropriating it into the idea of “Bob” in Twin Peaks.  Clever, but certainly not original.  When the Sheriff and Agent Cooper have successfully captured Leland Palmer (through trickery), Bob reveals himself and spills the beans.  Then, when Bob leaves Leland, Leland tells the men that when he was young, Bob asked to “come inside of him” and he let him in. Hmmm…sounds sheepy to me!  Before he leaves his host, Bob tells the men that when he leaves Leland, he will remember all of the horrible things he has done “in Bob’s name” so to speak and he will die. And, he does. Same thing when the sheep leaves you: you die.  In Twin Peaks, we do have the character of Mike, who has cut his arm off in order to get Bob out of him; otherwise, he would have died eventually as a result of Bob.  Mike tells us that he killed many in Bob’s name, just like Leland. So we know the “m.o.” on Bob: he jumps from person to person wreaking havoc. Same thing with Murakami’s sheep.  The trick, of course, is figuring out the allegory behind the Sheep, and Bob.

The other clue that Lynch is appropriating Murakami is in the scene when Agent Cooper assembles his suspects in the Road House: Ben Horne, Leland Palmer, Leo Johnson.  Agent Cooper has connections with the mystical other world, and once they’re all assembled, he says one person is missing that he didn’t invite because he didn’t know who to invite.  Nonetheless, the meeting “had been called.” Then, immediately after, the old man from the Great Northern Hotel is brought in by Major Briggs and he is the other, expected/unexpected party.  He is an integral piece of the puzzle, and without him, the Giant wouldn’t have been able to tell him who murdered Laura Palmer.

This is reminiscient of a scene late in A Wild Sheep Chase when the protagonist is “on to” the Sheep Man’s identity and tells him that his friend, known as The Rat, will be coming at 10pm.  The protagonist didn’t know if his friend would show up, but he announced the meeting to the Sheep Man (because he suspected the Sheep Man was The Rat).  This, after The Rat had been eluding him for quite a while. Turns out he was right and the Sheep Man was The Rat.  What ensues, in the dark, is that The Rat tells him the story of the Sheep trying to “enter” him and the only way he could keep from being taken completely over by the Sheep was to kill himself. The Rat was already dead and he was coming to visit his friend using the Sheep Man identity. Keep in mind that the Sheep Man and the Sheep (that possesses people maliciously) are actually different entities.

Anyway, the point is that Lynch has appropriated this scene of suprise identity and a mystical meeting straight from Murakami’s novel.

I’ve taken the liberty of searching online for instances of “murakami and twin peaks” and “lynch and murakami” and I’m sad to report that instead of Twin Peaks being linked back to Murakami, you find many instances of descriptions of Murakami’s books as “the Japanese Twin Peaks” or Murakmi listed with Lynch as an influence.  I wonder if he knows this and is pissed off. I would be because it is clear to me that it’s the other way around.

While I’m really enjoying Twin Peaks, I’m a little dumbfounded by how blatant these appropriations are.  Of course, there is no original art, but you’d think by now (2009), someone would have pointed out that Lynch took some bits from Murakami, NOT the other way around.

I’ve done some research on Japanese “postmodern” fiction and it is a complicated issue to call anything ‘Eastern’ by a ‘Western’ title such as postmodern due to the difference between the cultural and historical definitions of “postmodern.”   In the West, we try to label things based on our own definitions of things. For instance, we have determined that postmodernity, in the historical sense, began post WWII in the WEST, and in the cultural sense, it began in the WEST when we started to become aware of the over-bombardment and discombobulation-effects of our cultural consumption-driven practices. BUT, what we Westerners label as postmodern (let’s just throw out the concept of the simulacrum) has been written about in Japan for more than 200 years, and we can’t forget Plato….  My point is that the actual elements of what the West calls postmodern literature and theory didn’t begin with Don DeLillo or William Gibson or Fredric Jameson.  We have claimed it but we didn’t originate it (albeit Plato is “Western”).

My roundabout point is that we naturally say Lynch influenced Murakami because we closedmindedly see things only from our own perspective without considering true origins.  But, that is not the case. The timeline clearly shows otherwise.  We try to claim everything, but we are late.

Because I haven’t read all of the known literature or watched all of the films in the entire world, I cannot possibly know what other works have elements of Lynch’s work or Murakami’s work in them, or vice versa. I am merely pointing out that 8+ years before Twin Peaks, Murakami had a Sheep.

I like the idea of the watcher (Wiesler) becoming enmeshed in the lives of those he’s watching. The film portrays, obviously, the lowering of the boundary of otherness from the perspective of the watcher in this case. It literally shows compassion developing on screen. It shows a critical engagement with the world around and a nonacceptance of things just because they’re “told” to you, or just because that’s the way you’ve been perceiving reality all of your life. 

The best part of the film is watching the learning process (of compassion for others) unfold. It begins when Wiesler finds out the reason he’s watching Dreyman: because Dreyman’s girlfriend is being pursued by a top-ranking gov’t official and he wants to get Dreyman out of the way. For Wiesler, a REAL “company man,” this is fundamentally unacceptable because he does his job not because of politics or power, but because he believes what he is doing is right for the State. Thus begins his questioning of authority, and it takes him all the way through until near the end when he is demoted to a crummy job as a letter opener (complete with steam machines and a dark basement) for his conscientious meddling in the Dreyman case.

Then The Wall falls and Wiesler no longer works for the State. But afterwards, neither Wiesler nor Dreyman meet each other, despite Dreyman’s knowledge of the entire investigation and the complete surveillance of his life (which he learns after the fact).  Dreyman even does a little surveillance himself, but like Wiesler, cannot bring himself to meet his secret protector.  The film ends on Wiesler picking up Dreyman’s book, Sonata for a Good Man, and he finds the book is dedicated to him.  Poetic indeed because both are Good Men.

The ironic thing is that both men are secret protectors for each other. Wiesler protects Dreyman because he knows he’s a good man and shouldn’t be under surveillance just because the gov’t official wants to get laid.  And Dreyman knows Wiesler is a good man because after reading his vast Stasi files, he knows Wiesler changed a lot of information in order to protect him, not to mention he absconded with his treasonous typewriter in the nick of time. In those scenes in the film when the viewer knows Wiesler is changing what he heard coming from Dreyman’s apartment, the viewer can’t help but feel like Wiesler really wants to be a part of Dreyman’s life.  And in the end, he does become a part of Dreyman’s life because Dreyman’s life is only possible, in the now, because of Wiesler’s willingness to subvert an authority that was fundamentally flawed, and because Wiesler, as a newly compassionate human being, had evolved away from a simple task-ape, into a fully functioning and critically engaging autonomous individual.

We can say all sorts of things about the power of surveillance (thank you, Mr. Foucault) and the atrocities the Germans levelled on their own people, etc. etc. But I’m more interested in the truly human that this film so directly presents. Yes, it’s important to note that the USA Patriot Act pretty much guarantees the same ridiculous government access to us, as the extensive network of Stasi spies did for East Germans.  The truly ironic thing is that “we” think we’re watching an historical movie (made in the present, of course), when we’re really just watching what’s unfolding for us in the present.   Mr. Shakespeare did this well by presenting things “over in Verona” or wherever, but we can still apply this same theory today. We may be watching a film made by a German in 2006 and set in 1980s East Germany, but we are wholly right to insinuate its relevance to the good ole USA since 2001.

So when will the “Royal We”  re-learn humanity?  And can we do it one person at a time, as this film implies?  What is the proverbial Wall that will have to fall for us to throw off the shackles of “our” current inhumanity?  Gitmo? Something else? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

What struck me as I was watching this film was Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual. (I’ve noted this also in my post on Slumdog Millionnaire) This comes out most profoundly in the scene when Kaspar is sitting down with the Professor and the maid and the Professor asks him the most ridiculous Logic question of all time: the one about if you’re approaching a crossroads and to the left is the Village of Liars, and to the right is the Village of Truth-Tellers, and a person approaches you, what question do you ask him/her in order to determine which Village he/she comes from because your ultimate goal is to get to the Village of Truth-Tellers.  Personally, like the maid in the film, I could not answer this question of “Logic.”  And she does well to defend Kaspar’s unreadiness to answer such a question, and she even admits that she could not answer it.  The Professor’s answer still doesn’t make sense to me and it probably never will. In fact, I’ve forgotten the answer but it involved a double negative.  And, anytime a Professor shows up in a film like this, it’s obvious the critique is on academia (sorry my academic readers…which is all of you! ) This sentiment is also resonated in places like The Simpsons: have you ever noticed how many times they make fun of graduate students?!)  Kaspar said he had another answer, and that was to ask the traveler whether he/she was a tree frog.  If the person was from the Village of Liars, the traveler would answer “yes” and if the traveler was from the Village of Truth-Tellers, the answer would be “no.”  Then it would be obvious which was from the Village of Truth-Tellers. This makes absolute sense, and based on the progression of Kaspar’s “intellect” from the beginning up until this point in the film, it shows an amazing capacity for organic logic.  But, of course, the Professor said he couldn’t accept that answer because it was all description and no logic.  Of course, neither Kaspar nor the maid could say much in retaliation so they both just sat there.  How often do we just sit there in the face of blatant closedmindedness?

The point is that one need not an academic background to be intelligent or intellectual or logical. Hence, Gramsci’s organic intellectual.  But the irony there is that an academic formulated this theory. So does that automatically invalidate the existence of the organic intellectual? What would Benjamin say?

Herzog presents such an amazing perspective on family and culture in this film. Every time you turn around, he is presenting a critique of some aspect of life. The most blatant is the (un)education and treatment of children by their parents. There are other true stories in history of “wild” children who were kept locked up or out with the dogs for their entire lives. I’ve seen TV specials on this, and films like Slingblade at least fictionally document the ramifications of such treatment. And in the news within the past year there was the report of the Australian (or was it Austrian?)  father who kept his 40-yr old daughter in the basement where he forced her to live and bear his incestuous children.  We do the most awful things to ourselves. It’s very much like Ursula LeGuin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” about a Utopian town that hides a dirty secret: they’re imprisoning a child in a dirty cellar to take the allegorical brunt of their happiness.  This short story is a perfect parallel for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

The saddest part, of course, is that this is based on a true story. But that’s what Herzog does best: take the real and add elements of fiction to make it sublime.  Herzog has taken the legend and history of Kaspar Hauser and added elements that make it not just a presentation of Kaspar’s story, but also a presentation of society’s ills. Though, in defense of the town and those who took over Kaspar’s care, a great deal of effort and help was given to him (in the film), which reflects very positively on the “it takes a village” theory.

No one knows why Kaspar’s original caretaker (presumably his father???) kept him locked up but it is nonetheless profound that Herzog has this same “father” come back and kill Kaspar in the end. What is Herzog telling us with this?  The Village is there to support; the father is there to subvert? 

I think he’s telling us that people do beastly and ghastly things to their children, and sometimes they try to wipe them off the face of the earth in order to assuage their own guilt.   Oooh. Powerful stuff. Of course, it’s not just about that.

But more than just a presentation of parenting-gone-wrong, Herzog is clearly showing us the perversity behind our own understandings of culture, class, spectacle, intellect, and human relations. The scenes where the Side Show has Kaspar as one of the 4 Riddles, and where the British Lord is parading Kaspar around for his aristocratic guests,  are both meant to be disgustingly perverse in an Elephant Man sort of way.  Though I did love the British Lord’s character: high & tight pants showing off his accouterments, overly effeminate, and a bit Ichabod Crane in figure.  Classic! 

Then again, he is presenting the Village’s helpfulness as something in opposition to the parental role.

I liked that Herzog presented Kaspar as someone who was pure. Pure like an infant who knows absolutely nothing about the world. The scene in which Kaspar writes a letter to the Count about how he cried for a long time after he had sowed his name in seeds and then someone had trampled it, was touching and pure.  Kaspar was also presented as someone who was naturally inquisitive and logical. The scene in which he tried to convey his understanding of outside from inside when he was taken to the town’s prison tower that he had been in for 2 months, showed Kaspar’s own budding capacity for perspective and logic: he tried to explain how from the inside when he looked left and right and front and back he saw the brick of the cell, but when he was outside he looked back and saw the brick, but when he looked left right and forward he saw the town…this was something he had realized on his own, and it’s something we all take for granted as an everyday thing, and not as a victory of intellect like it was for Kaspar. 

But what sort of victory is accomplished with the death of Kaspar Hauser?  Are we extinguishing our guilt? Are we reinforcing our closedness to organic logic, or our adherence to notes of cultural respectability? Are we choosing to manipulate the spectacular and pervert the innocent for our own guilty pleasures? Are we extinguishing the other so we won’t be revealed as frauds? Yes, all this and more.

I have defended the Village a little in this but I’d like to end with a major critique.  The final scene of the film is of Kaspar’s autopsy. They take out his brain, examine it, and cut it apart. As the ironically deformed clerk is walking away after documenting the notes of the autopsy, he skips away down the street saying they’ve figured out what was wrong with Kaspar: deformities of the liver and brain.

This brings to mind Francis Bacon’s 4 Idols (all 4: the Marketplace, Theatre, Village and Cave idols would all work in various ways with this situation) or the logical fallacy of cause and effect. Kaspar wasn’t who he was because of deformities of the liver and brain; he was who he was because of NURTURE, or lack thereof.  Herzog ending this way really drives the message home that society overlooks the obvious in order to prove its ridiculous theories about things. We look for false causes for the effects we see. We try to prove theories by shoving things together that we know will prove them, rather than looking objectively at the facts to “see” if they will prove the theory.  Herzog’s Professor of ”logic” is a testament to this.  Bacon’s Idols of the Tribe attest to the sometimes ridiculousness of collective thinking, and that is what Herzog gives us at the end of this film.  He also reminds us of how much dirt we’ve swept under the rug so that we can live in denial of the ugly truth that we live in a dirty house.

This film gets better and better the more I think (and write) about it.

What’s clear in this film is that there is a ”reprogrammed”  or brainwashed sex slave who has been let loose into the world. He runs into a girl, Himiko, who apparently has problems too. She is making a map of the world around her so she can find her way around easily. She apparently has amnesia.  She drags him back to her subterranean “apartment” (she’s really a squatter in the basement of a building) and tries to teach him to talk. She discovers a tattoo that says “Pinocchio 964″ on his back and so she figures his name is Pinocchio. She tries to teach him to be normal.

Eventually they have sex. He is a sex slave and is apparently wired that way. The film description says he’s a “lobotomized, cybernetic sex bot” but in the film I failed to see any proof of the cybernetic bot part other than the basic concept of brainwashing/reprogramming.  But still, this film is labelled Cyberpunk.  It’s Japanese-weird, if that’s a genre, so I guess that counts as Cyberpunk….;)  Well, when they have sex, pretty much all hell breaks loose because Himiko goes way past bonkers.  Pinocchio also goes through some sort of very bizarre Blob-esque transformation with tentacles of slimy ooze (reminded me of Japanese horror-porn with the always incredibly long gellatinous phallus chasing people) that he is stuck to the floor with. The metaphor is pretty clear here. At some point, Himiko truly snaps because she runs around throwing up LARGE quantities of what is clearly oatmeal or rice but is, from what I can gather, a metaphor for male ejaculate.  So both of them have a similar experience associated with this substance, from their different perspectives.

Himiko, after purging herself to infinity and beyond, goes off to the local hardware store and picks up a cart full of supplies that she uses in a very sinister way. She takes Pinocchio out to the junk yard and shackles him into these metal neck, arm and leg braces and then welds him shut so he’s permanently “in the stocks,” so to speak. Worse, she chains him to a huge weight that he then has to drag around. 

She basically tricks him and now has control over him.  We must stop at this point to consider what just happened. 

Himiko’s trauma was clearly realized when she had sex, willingly I might add, with Pinocchio. But there was something in her past that she had been blocking out that was then violently reopened with that act. It sent her into insanity. I’m guessing she was sexually abused in some way.  And if we consider Pinocchio, his whole life consisted of sexual abuse because his only function in life was to be a sex slave; he had no autonomy, no agency. When people are sexually abused, they are stripped of their autonomy for sure. So both of these characters are bound by their programming in their various ways: Himiko by her mysterious past, Pinocchio by his programmed present.

It seemed pretty clear that Himiko was reacting to her earlier abuse by enslaving Pinocchio and taking back that autonomy and agency she had lost.  But it was a VIOLENT retaking. It was unethical to the n’th degree. But it does seem to coincide with the cycle of abuse that is perpetuated when people are abused: they in turn abuse others some percentage of the time. It is sad, but true.  But just because Pinocchio seemed mentally incapable of functioning in the real world due to his “cybernetic” reprogramming, there were glimpses that he still retained some of his former self/mind because at some point (before Himiko chained him up) he was actually talking, and asking “What is happening to me?” and “Why is this happening to me?” and “Help me.” Things like that. 

But by the end, it became a real face-off of dueling insanities because Pinocchio eventually broke free of his weight, killed a few people along the way (including his creator and the creator’s secretary) and in a bizarre twist, he and Himiko morphed.

It’s hard to say exactly what was going on with all of this because as a non-Japanese speaking viewer, I can’t rely on the subtitles for all the subtext or cultural references.  You can’t even rely on subtitles to be accurate translations of the dialogue.

But, by the end, it seems to me that this film was about how we abuse each other, and the extent to which we’ll go to hold power over others and exploit them. But, it’s also about the power of the human will to overcome such obstacles. In Himiko’s case, she had forgotten about her past abuse, so her own mind had protected her. In Pinocchio’s case, his mind was trying to peek through to tell him that something bad had happened to him. And that’s why he was going insane: because he didn’t have the capacity to right the wrong done to his mind. All he could do was kill the people who did it, and hope that eventually his mind would heal.

The fact that Himiko was making a map of her surroundings was an indicator of the cyberpunkish/postmodern theme, I suppose. With the map, she would no longer need the territory, as Baudrillard would tell you. But, if we translate that into the frame of the mind, there can be dire consequences when the map of the mind replaces the territory of the mind.  Pinocchio’s mind was “remapped” and the territory of his Self was almost nearly gone, all so that he would be a sex slave and could be sold to rich old horny ladies. And with Himiko, her memory had wiped the mental slate clean in order to protect her from the atrocities of her past abuse, and the new map of nothingness was the only thing keeping her sane.

So what is this telling us? Leave the territory intact and natural. Don’t disturb the delicate balance of the mind. Don’t abuse and exploit. A powerful message, really, told in an intense manner. Like I said at the beginning, the incessant screaming and moaning throughout the film really fill the viewer with a sense of high anxiety while watching this.  I suppose we’re supposed to internalize this and react in a way that keeps us from perpetuating such violence and abuse on others. To watch someone enslaving someone who’s already enslaved by their mind is dreadful. But things like that happen every day, in every culture.

Sadly, if we trust Baudrillard, at the moment the map is made, the territory is obliterated. So we can never return. We must stay in insanity. There’s no more Shire as you knew it, Mr. Frodo!

I suppose these filmmakers were going for invoking a real sense of nostalgia with this film. To be able to act those things out, as 40-year olds, is quite a hearkening back to the old days many people had growing up.  This film was a real Peter Pan moment, I think.  It shows a refusal to truly grow up, the struggle against loss of innocence associated with growing up, and a return to that childish innocence that we were all stripped of when we were expected to shed our childlike ways and don more appropriate adult realties.

It is a thoughtful anachronism, these two characters and their prolonged childhood.  They are out of place in time in many respects, but by the end of the film, their paternal authority figure admits to his own childhood dreams of growing up to be a T-rex.  He says all he ever wanted to be was a T-rex and he would walk around the back yard with his arms tiny, acting like a T-rex.  This reminds me of one of our nephews who, when he was 3′ish, told me he wanted to be a Kitty when he grew up!  And that’s probably one of the sweetest and most innocent things I’ve ever heard in my life.  One day, much later on (he was 4-5′ish), after I had asked him if he still wanted to be a Kitty, he looked at me funny and said “No.” He now wanted to be something more appropriate, like a baseball player.  He didn’t seem to remember wanting to be a Kitty.  But I remembered. I still remember.

I still want to be a Kitty.

I think, as an adult, it is sometimes very desirable to want to retreat back to a time of innocence and exploration.  A time when you could be a kid for real. Now we can only “play” kids because those times have long passed for us.  But we still remember what it was like and we find a lot of humor in it. Obviously.  Maybe that’s why, by the time we’re in our 30s (for some of us, earlier or later), we’re ready for kids of our own:  because we want to re-experience the innocence since we have been coerced into being adults or adult-like for most of our lives.

We watched the racy, extended version of this film and it had some pretty crazy-funny parts.  I loved that in the midst of their anachronistic innocence, they were still very pure: pure of body and mind. The sex scenes with Dale (Reilly) and Alice were, I think, typical of teenage hormones. Alice was repressed, in all senses of the word, and she was merely acting out, like a child, in reaction to her overly-controlling husband.  …calling Dr. Freud!!!!    And Dale didn’t realize what was going on at all the first time they did it in the bathroom. And even by the end, after it had happened a few times with Alice, he calls it “making sex” with her.  There’s something to be said about not tainting your reality with what I think today is an overabundant burden on the idea of sex (knowing about it, wanting it, having it). And the fact that the family didn’t realize, or care, that they were having sex right in front of them (because Dale was helping her with a back spasm….;), shows how little parents tell their kids about sex, or are observant enough to pick up on the flashing red signs that they’re already doing it, literally, under their noses.

I like stupid, potty humor so this film kept me rolling.

But, of course, they do die. They die ’til they are dead.  And Lancelot and Gawain are two of the most awesome knights Arthur has! 

And while Fuqua makes a sickeningly obvious attempt to show sexual tension between Guinevere and Lancelot, it doesn’t do much good considering he kills him off WAY too early to cause any problems for Arthur & Guinevere’s domestic bliss!  Ahh, the horror!  The horror!

There are three battle scenes, “thoughtfully” placed at the beginning, middle, and end. The first one goes on forever and is way too much, just like the last one. The middle one is fair-to-midling.  The endless slaughter is so…Braveheart! 

And, speaking of Braveheart, turns out in Fuqua’s narrative, Guinevere is of the Scottish clans AND is a top-notch marksman, especially when she is wearing the Clan’s standard bikini push-up top and is painted blue for battle.

It was a decent movie to watch, but as far as overall critical enjoyability, I at least wouldn’t rank it lower than Troy in terms of narrative inconsistencies between it and the literary tradition, but it isn’t ranked much higher. I will say that Clive Owen is more convincing  as Arthur than Brad Pitt ever was as Achilles. And another highlight was Ray Stevenson, who played the knight Dagonet (anyone remember that one from the Arthuriad???):  he played Titus Pullo in my beloved Rome…oh, bring it back HBO, bring it back!

Oh, and before I forget:  the film was about the most obvious propaganda I’ve seen for the spreading of British-American “democracy” EVER!  Arthur brought Freedom to the Britons: Freedom at a very high cost.

In terms of The Lord of the Rings connection, you have the very obvious “ring” metaphor, which in Hellboy II is the three-part “crown” that was created to reign supreme over the Golden Army of mechanical, indestructable monsters.  The three parts were divided up: two to the Elf King’s two children, and one to the Men.  I mean, come on Mr. del Toro, don’t you know we’ve already seen this trope and it has been cemented in our subconscious by Peter Jackson (not to mention J.R.R. Tolkein)?!  Also, in Hellboy II, the animated sequence with the wooden-looking Men versus the Elf King and Trolls was creative in terms of its aesthetics, but it was just a retooled LOTR, even down to Sauromon’s “making” of the Orc Army.  In Hellboy II, the subterranean Golden Army factory was exactly the same as what we saw in LOTR.  And the Elves & Trolls vs. Man thing…c’mon?!  I just don’t get why del Toro did this.  It really brought the overall quality of the film down.

And, is it generally recognized everywhere that all Elves have long blonde hair, or was that del Toro just riding piggyback some more.

In terms of Star Wars, del Toro re-used a few tropes: Liz Sherman’s pregnancy & Hellboy’s destiny.  Liz’s pregnancy is a secret to Hellboy for most of the film. And, when we get to the final scene of the film, as they’re all walking away, Hellboy says something about the “baby” and Liz says, “babies.” Hellboy turns around and she flashes two fingers up and mimes “two,” then the film ends on Hellboy’s stunned face.  So what does this have to do with Star Wars, you say?!  Only everything!!!  Padme ushers in the twins, Luke & Leah, in 2005′s Revenge of the Sith, and their destinies are all tied to the fate of the universe (as we all know from watching all of the films).    So, like Padme, Liz Sherman’s twins will no doubt have an effect on the fate of the world, especially because of the information she receives about Hellboy’s destiny, via  ”The Angel of Death,” who heals Hellboy’s wound so he can live to eventually destroy the world….???  That screams the Anakin-Darth-Vader-destiny-trope to me, loud and clear. As the Angel of Death was telling Liz about Hellboy’s destiny, and how she would suffer the most, I couldn’t help but think of Padme laying on the table dying after giving birth to Luke & Leah, while Anakin was out on the burning plain, dismembered and prostrate, primed for his destiny, anger palpable and growing exponentially after being defeated by Obi Wan.

The last thing I’ll say about this film is that there were loopholes in the plot and dialogue that do not explain why the Elves & Trolls are living under Manhattan, especially when the secret hideout for the Golden Army is in Ireland.  I just don’t get why del Toro places this mythical world under NYC.  And it certainly isn’t explained for the viewer.  At least that part is original: I doubt anyone would believe the locations for Star Wars or LOTR were ever in Manhattan. Despite that originality, it still leaves the viewer wondering:  why?!  

I’m just saying that Hellboy II, despite its very funny moments and decent cinematography, was a re-rendering of other films.  I’m not saying it was a bad film. It was okay. I just wish we could get a good action-superhero film with great costumes and interesting characters, that was at least not a near-exact duplication of other films we’ve already seen.  Can’t we watch films like this and not feel like the director takes us for mindless Trolls?

This film reminded me of a Haruki Murakami novel because of the mystery that unfolds for the viewer.  As the film progresses, the viewer sees that what was presented before has now changed, and what this new reality is, is an unstable one for the viewer but maybe not for the characters. Or maybe it is just as unstable for them as it is for us.  It is very much in the same vein as another film I wrote about on this blog, Open Your Eyes (and of course, Vanilla Sky, Mr. McG!)

The film is set in Bangkok, Thailand and the protagonist is a Japanese man (Kenji) who works as a librarian, and a Thai girl (Noi) who is a call girl/prostitute.

Reality comes into question when the viewer gets a glimpse of Kenji’s brother’s full-back tattoo, and later Kenji has this same full-back tattoo. Whether the brother ever truly existed is a matter up for debate, I suppose.  Also, when Noi and her dead twin sister become interchangeable to Kenji without a second glance from him, it becomes clear that something is rotten in the State of Kenji’s mind. 

All I know is that sometimes it’s nice to watch a film and at the end of it I look at D and say: what’s that supposed to mean?!

In many ways, I think this film has some loose intellectual ends, though it was creatively done.

I’ve liked the other Fritz Lang films I’ve watched (Metropolis & M). We’ll give it another try some other time…..

Okay, I’m not going to say much more about the green reptilian alien baby hand puppet other than to merely mention it, but I will say that that was a highlight of the series for me.  Well, the whole birthing scene was fantastic with the “regular” looking human baby and its evil green twin.  But, even the human baby had a few moments of monsterdom when she came out and hissed with her nasty reptilian tongue, and then later as she “grew up” very quickly, she spat poison on another little girl, paralyzing her.  But the green reptilian alien baby was a feat of superb special effects. I’ve said before on this blog, and I’ll say it again: I LOVE older special effects.  The ones that are so obviously unreal that it really crowns the occasion because they couldn’t come up with anything better. No CGI, no problem!

I suppose a lot was going on in the real world when this TV miniseries was on.  We can make some plausible connections between the alien Visitors and Communists, for sure, because the Visitors wore red and they were “aliens” who not only were sucking the oceans dry, but they also stored and ate us.  I’m pretty sure those were the major complaints against the communists, right?!  And the Visitors recruited young’uns for their police brigades, which very nearly resembles our friend George Orwell’s sentiments in 1984 (oh, irony and coincidence!) about the propensity of Youth to be spies, etc.  And, the Hitler Youth.  And on and on.

What I liked about this series was that it:

1. Had a cheese factor of 10 (on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest).  Cheesy effects, Cheesy dialogue, Cheesy character development.  REALLY cheesy acting.

2.  It was Science Fiction!

3. And, it showed the humans working with the rebel Visitors to overthrow the tyranny. 

The only thing I didn’t like was that in the end, it didn’t show what life was like getting used to living with the Visitors who were left behind. Maybe there’s a sequel that I don’t know about. Maybe I’ll make one in my back yard.  Anybody seen the Beastmaster lately?!

Eventually I will learn how to upload a better quality video to YouTube but for now this will have to do. 

And, if you’re wondering, that is us singing and playing the theme song, and Samantha played the accordian for the sound track.  It’s all us from start to finish.

Hope you enjoy watching it!

It’s hard to say whether this was a “bad” film or not.  It is what it is:  a cheesy Sci Fi B-movie.  There is a play (i.e. twist) on almost every convention in Clarke’s 2010 book sequel (not to mention on the poor film version of 2010, which I’ve seen but didn’t bother writing about on this blog….).

In Sayonara Jupiter, there was  a very unexpected sex scene in which Eiji and Maria float naked through space (on tables covered with black sheets that you can see, of course), which turned out to be a very long and floaty sequence.   Matter of fact, there were quite a few scenes that were too long and should have been eliminated or reduced.  Barbarella came to mind during this long, drawn out sequence of floating, naked bodies (for the naked bodies part, not the long, drawn out part).

The narrative action throughout didn’t always answer logical questions about how we got from A to B, etc.  And, it wasn’t necessarily a low-budget film because of the elaborate sets, models, explosions, etc. So one has to wonder about a lot of things, like why did they waste time on certain scenes and not tie up narrative loopholes that they otherwise could have covered, etc.  But, it’s a B-movie.

And the addition of the hippy singer (Peter), his dolphin named Jupiter, and his cult group of rainbow-painted & overly tanned followers added a bizarre twist (on the space theme), especially when there were moments of folkish kumbaya pastoral montage, very much like music videos you would expect from John Denver, only sung in Japanese. 

I suppose what this film was trying to convey was that humans need to do whatever it takes to survive, and if that means blowing up Jupiter to either provide energy to the outer colonies, or to throw a black hole off course, then we will do what we have to do.  And, of course, Peter’s resistance movement created a nice counterpart to the domination of space theme.  Peter’s Jupiter Church wanted to preserve the natural state of Jupiter (the planet, not the dolphin), and so acted as a Greenpeace-in-Space, trying to sabotage Eiji’s plans to blow up Jupiter and turn it into a sun (this is one of the twists to the 2010plot, where it was the Monoliths who managed to turn Jupiter into another sun).  But, it turns out, the blowing up of Jupiter plan had an emergency use: to save the entire solar system from the growing black hole.  So all’s well that ends well.

Despite the constant, silly, B-movie moments and a mixture of Japanese, English, French, and German language, this film was probably worth the time just to say I watched it. Though I doubt there’s much to be extracted in the ‘profound’ department on this one.

This film, on the surface, is about society’s acceptance  and perpetuation of violence.  The plot centers around legalized hunting of humans, a.k.a. The Big Hunt, where hunters and victims battle it out, and if a hunter makes it to the 10th victim, he/she wins $1m.  So, the people running around in broad daylight, in crowds of people, shooting at each other is a socially-acceptable and government-sanctioned thing to do.  There are licenses and permits and bounties to collect if you’re the victor on any hunt.  There’s a great degree of obviousness to this storyline.  No extra brains required.

This film, though clearly about violence, is also about fear of marriage.  And more than just fear of marriage, it’s about getting married despite your fears.  The viewer can clearly see a romance building throughout the film, but isn’t necessarily expecting a Jane Austen-esque marriage plot to unfold by the end. Nevertheless, that’s what happens, and Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) gets “tricked” into marrying his hunter after a series of bizarre twists with their hunt. 

I suppose you can be a victim of violence, or of marriage. 

Set in some sort of futuristic, bizzarro world that looks exactly like regular 1965 Rome but with the addition of interesting looking  (and supposedly futuristic) clothes, this film doesn’t quite scream “fantastic” at you.  And I’m pretty sure the themesong was borrowed from Mastroianni’s earlier film, Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960), which is unfortunate.  The ole coat tails thing….

I suppose Mastroianni was cast in this for his star-appeal.  But it’s a big let down based on the other films I’ve seen him in. 

I’d say Petri tried too hard.  It wasn’t a horrible film, but it wasn’t great either.  I usually don’t write about films that don’t speak to me in some way, but I might as well for this one.

The CG animation films always perplex me:  they look like they’re made for children but they’re all about the adult themes.  Same as South Park or Family Guy or The Simpsons.

What I was left with after watching Wall-E was a profound sense of disappointment with the human race.  I know, I know, by the end they’ve all come back and all that.  But, this film is truly disturbing.  I don’t think I’d want my child to see it and have the opportunity to see what a failure humanity is/has become, as presented in this film. 

While the love story between Wall-E and Eve is sweet and touching, it is overshadowed (to me) by the generally depressing nature of the film’s diegetic reality:  that the earth is a big garbage dump of our own doing, that we have left it completely, that our lives are completely controlled by a mega-corporation, that we’ve left robots (i.e. “others”) to clean up our mess, and that we have gotten so disillusioned and distracted by our “devices” that we literally don’t see the world around us. 

I just wonder how children receive this film and what they understand about its message.  Do they see their own in-car DVD players as the same as the telescreens the people in the film ride around all day long watching?  Or their Wii or Xbox consoles?  Or their iPods?  Because as an adult, I felt like crap after watching it because all of those devices capture and manipulate our attention to the n’th degree today.

I guess I should ask some kids about their thoughts on the state of humanity today and whether we can (or should) stop the future predicted by Pixar….  I think you’d be hard pressed to find a kid or an adult with an in-car DVD player who would be willing to give it up to save the future of humanity!

I liked that the Auto Pilot was pretty much HAL-9000, and that the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme song was added for effect. 

I appreciated that the filmmakers made a huge effort to address these issues, especially when Mary realized they had a pool, and when the captain tried to walk, etc.  But, overall I’m overcome by the fact that in many ways, we are living this reality already.

What I like about Fellini is how he presents (and therefore essentially critiques) society and our various approaches to life.  A consistent presentation of such in his films is that of the Catholic church.  While the film does not depict real clergymen, Fellini has his three (and then later four) swindlers pose as clergymen in order to swindle poor rural folks out of their hard-earned money.  I don’t think he intended to present the rural people necessarily as stupid and gullible, but rather the swindlers as taking advantage of the power that the clergy holds over people.  And the clergy-swindle (involving paying for masses in exchange for a box of treasure) occurs in the film multiple times with two sets of swindlers, while the other swindles only happen once (besides the sequence with the gas station incidents, which happen back-to-back).

Another thing I like about Fellini films, in general, is that Fellini gives you an inside look at a particular person (or group of people): their happiness, their sadness, their humiliation, their downfall, etc. 

By the end of the film, however, the viewer is left wondering what the point of all of it was because Augusto certainly doesn’t learn anything from his experiences. Not that the viewer is necessarily expecting the film to express a moral.  But perhaps the point of this film was to point out that Augusto’s life went nowhere:  always had and always would have.    One can only surmise that his eventual downfall was a result of reconnecting with his daughter and promising to help her with money.  And, in the end, it was money that was Augusto’s downfall and no one could HEAR him when he cried for help. 

The ability to hear and effectively communicate is a theme that I’ve studied in Fellini’s La dolce vita.  I won’t go into the gorey details (you can read my M.A. Essay if you want…..)  but suffice it to say that a character’s inability to effectively communicate or hear appears to be something Fellini does intentionally in order to convey his vision about human interactions and understanding.  It’s a beautiful theme to notice in his films and certainly makes them more memorable in terms of Fellini’s craft. 

Augusto didn’t learn anything in the end (because he got himself into a life-threatening situation as a result of his pursuit of money), and he was hurt and crying out for help and no one could hear him.  And that’s what’s so great about Fellini and his films.  Some of his characters learn something about “moving on” and “making a better life” by the end (Cabiria  in Le notti di Cabiria ) and others don’t (Marcello in La dolce vita).  I say this because some people in the real world want to learn from their experiences and not make the same mistakes again.  However, in Marcello’s defense, I think he does learn something:  he perhaps learns how to live in his world of glamour magazines and orgy parties a lot better, rather than running away into the saner world that the little girl Paola represents. 

I think Fellini’s various film worlds and characters represent a reasonable reflection on the real world because some people learn from their mistakes and others do not.  Some people want to better their lives, others do not.  Some people want to be productive members of society and have respectable jobs, others do not.  And that’s okay.  It takes a lot of people to make such a diverse world.  Life would be infinitely boring if we were all bankers and aristocrats and little girls working at seaside restaurants.  We need swindlers, whores, and leaches like gossip columnists and Paparazzo to keep the world from becoming a homogeneous bore.  It’s those people that Fellini makes films about, and I like it.

The last thing I’ll say about this film is that the sound was a little annoying in places.  And, by that, I mean that there was an overwhelming racket, especially during the party scene, that either was a fault or something intentional in order to discombobulate.  The viewer expects some loudness but it was truly overwhelming.  My suspicion is that whoever prepared/remastered the DVD didn’t pay attention to sound levels.

Black Sunday was a pleasure to watch.  Without taking notes during the entire thing, it’s hard to recall all of the amazing camera angles, lighting, and other various shots, but suffice it to say that it was a visually stunning film.  I kept thinking about one of my other favorite films, also made in 1960, which is Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and how amazing it is that both Fellini and Bava were both creating such visually stunning films at the same time in different genres. 

The effects were great, especially with the regeneration/reanimation of the witch, first with lots of maggots and then with eyeballs!  Lovely.

There were many predictable moments, however, but that’s just because the cliches of horror have been done and overdone so much that it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to know what’s coming in an Italian horror film almost 50 years after it was made.  One such was when the two doctors first encounter the witch’s sarcophagus and Dr. Kruvajan is staring into the glass:  I knew he would cut himself and the blood would drip into her mouth and cause her to reawaken.  And, it happened just like that. 

I suppose after watching this that I should be afraid of what I do to people in the present because they could come back to haunt my progeny.  Or, maybe they should be careful of what they do to me!  Muahaaahahaaaaa!

This Russian film was directed by Aleksandr Rou. And like all fairy tales, it has a moral.  And, like many Russian films, that moral tends toward glorifying the State.  And that’s okay.  I don’t mind.  I liked this film a lot.  I loved the colors and the characters with their backwards names, like “Dneirf,” which was translated in the subtitles as “Friend.” Or “Lesaew,” which was translated in the subtitles as “Weasel.”  Clever. 

The moral for children is to not only obey your elders, but  to also be able to see yourself through someone else’s eyes.  This is what gets Olya into trouble with Grandma, and ultimately she takes a trip into the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors (where she meets her “crooked mirror image twin, Yalo,” and they have adventures to save Dneirf) , only to come out of that crazy, crooked world where people are manifestations of animals, understanding that she must watch her behavior.

The moral for adults is summed up nicely in the end when Olya, Yalo, and Dneirf sing a song praising the flag, after Olya and Yalo save Dneirf through a series of very treacherous adventures. 

The sets and backdrops were fabulous.  As I’ve said on this blog before, I really like the obvious fakeness of older films, and this one does not disappoint in that respect.  The acting was great, with a few standout characters:  the Parrot King and Minister Toad.  The Parrot King really did the parrot sounds and movements remarkably well, not to mention his costuming and hair.  And the Minister Toad character was very funny at the end as he was running up a hill and making frog-swimming motions, as if he were swimming through the air to get up the hill.  And Minister Toad was the most colorful of the characters;  also the most scary looking!  I think the acting was very well put together overall. 

What I notice, upon researching the names again is that there appears to be a difference between the subtitles from the version I watched and the names listed online.  And I don’t know Russian so I’m doing my best to describe the characters and associate with them the names I remember.  For instance, “Dneirf” in the film’s subtitles is called “Gurd/Drug” on Wikipedia, and probably in the original Russian in the film. There are other differences with other characters too, obviously. But, I’m not writing a dissertation about the film, only a brief entry here. 

These Russian fairy tales are fun to watch.  I’ve written about another one on this blog, Old Khottabych (1956).     Good stuff!  Ready for more!

Obviously the story of Harvey Milk is a reminder of the long journey still ahead for gay rights.  Even today, nearly forty years later, we are still struggling to grant basic civil rights to homosexuals and to have a generally positive national attitude towards homosexuals.  Really, if this film shows anything, it’s that we haven’t come very far overall.  We still have the same biases and fears that the Anita Bryants of our time capitalize on.  They use the same old tactics as they did back then.  I’ve said before on this blog that we haven’t learned a thing from history.  What’s our problem?  It’s sad. 

I suppose the fact that we’ve elected our first African American President is testament to the long journey to equality that this film is trying to inspire for homosexuals.

The final sequences of the film were poetic: Harvey’s late-night phone call to Scott, his visit to the opera, and his last look at the world. 

I think what sticks out to me the most about this film is that danger from the outside (i.e. from the unknown, general public) is sometimes the most frightening on the surface, but in this case, it is the danger lurking always already around you in your “inner circle” that is the most potent.  This brings to mind the Judases and the Brutuses of the world–the “friends” and acquaintances with ulterior, sinister motives, lurking around us.  I don’t know if this was a direct message Van Sant was trying to send but clearly it is an issue in the film.

A few loose ends that weren’t rectified were the threats Harvey Milk got, especially at the big assembly.  One might guess Mr. White sent this one but the film provides no evidence to support that other than viewer presumption.  And no resolution to the earlier, little violent drawing either.  Perhaps this lends credence to my paragraph above about outside-inside threats and dangers.  Definitely doesn’t leave me feeling very good, and it reminds me of all of the school shootings, especially Columbine, where the culprits’ instability and problems were unchecked, overlooked, and completely ignored.  Mr. White, as portrayed in the film, had some clear issues, but Harvey Milk was too polite to dig too deep, or to care too much. 

So who are WE overlooking?

This film provides an interesting look at the life of a man who worked really hard for his community.  It’s infinitely sad that he was murdered.  I think this film is about showing his life and documenting part of the gay rights movement, but I also think this film is about the dangers lurking in our midst.  Eeek!

It’s an intriguing series to watch because you see fourteen children from different socioeconomic backgrounds in the UK, whose lives are tracked in increments of seven.  It’s interesting to see how your own predictions for them are right and wrong.  And, it gives you a very peripheral glimpse into the ways in which we are divided up based on notions of money and social class, and the opportunities present as a result. 

I feel like I can relate to what many of these individuals have experienced over the 14 years since they were first documented as seven year olds.  Some have met the expectations of their social class, and some have fallen way below what they could have accomplished.  Neil stands out as the 21-year old who becomes homeless (well, he’s “squatting” in an apartment), despite his lower middle class upbringing and having been given the opportunity to go to Aberdeen.  Suzy also:  she appeared to be perhaps from the wealthiest family, but at the age of 21 she was living a bit of a high-class vagabond life–traveling and going to secretarial school instead of university.  At 21, she didn’t seem overly concerned with the idea of a career or anything else.  But, I suppose her wealth allowed her the comforts of that lifestyle. She reminds me of a Jane Austen character; perhaps Miss Bingley from Pride & Prejudice.  Maybe that’s too harsh.

I think many of us struggle with expectations and opportunities we’re given:  do we continue to do things just because they’ve been provided for us or because we’ve “earned” them?  Or do we strike out into unidentified territory and do what’s comfortable for us, despite our socioeconomic plusses and minuses, or the availability of opportunities? 

I’m looking forward to watching the rest of these because so far they’re up to 49 and Up.

It was well worth the wait.  Why, you ask?

For starters, I didn’t fall asleep. 

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is elaborate on your own thoughts.  I think with Battleship Potemkin, this is infinitely difficult given only one viewing.  What stands out for me the most are some of the beautiful camera shots:  the battleship’s gun barrel in the foreground with the clouds in the background (giving a very nice, clear perspective of the barrel with murky clouds in the background), and the woman holding her dead child looking right at the viewer as she’s yelling on the steps (she’s yelling at ME, wanting ME to do something about the supression and the atrocities that are unfolding).  Nice!

Even the shear length of the film is impressive.  As I was watching it, I was thinking about how difficult it must have been to piece an hour and fifteen minutes together because there are so many repeated shots throughout. But, I must also consider that Eisenstein very well must have had a point to all of the repetition: perhaps as a reinforcement of the ideals he was portraying.

Something else I was thinking as I was watching the film was how the people in the film are clearly regular people.  I recall saying to SL, something like “move over NeoRealism!”  (though obviously Eisenstein predates the Italians on this one)  There’s just something about using regular people in a “People’s revolution” film that makes my heart swoon.  Perhaps that’s why I love Italian Neorealist films so much too.  SL and I cogitated over these regular folks, especially one of the older ladies in the film who could easily be found in the dictionary or encyclopedia under the term “Rode Hard and Put Away Wet.”  Bless her heart, as my mother would say.

I liked the use of the ship model, so clearly fake.  I think filmmaking today is too overdone in terms of its attempt to make things look “real.”  I invoke  Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Jonson and say:  let me retain my suspension of disbelief; I like it better that way. Don’t try to convince me that what I see is real. Let me see the puppeteer and I’m bound to appreciate your art a lot more.

The last thing I have to say is that I think it’s awfully ironic that the music that accompanies silent films is so important.  With this film, the somewhat frantic music (at times) sets a mood of anxiety and impending catastrophe that is altogether fitting for the mood of the film. 

Next time I screen this film I’m sure to have more to say. For now, this will have to do.

Anyway, on to the film. 

I like how Spielberg presented the idea of wealth as being something you certainly can’t take with you, as something that’s not an inherent part of your Self.  However, objects (no matter how small or dirty) are a major part of these characters’ lives.  Take Basie (John Malkovich) for instance: he asked Jim to take care of his stuff and when Basie had recovered from the beating he got from the Japanese camp commander, all of it was gone because Jim said he was too small to defend it for him.  And Basie’s character was someone who continually pursued possessions, relentlessly in fact. I think Spielberg is telling the viewer something here because the viewer can’t help but feel the “greasy” factor with Basie:  he’s a swindling, selfish rat that can’t be trusted, and yet everyone flocks to him.  We go from that to the arena scene when everyone’s flocking away from all of the discarded wealthy possessions.  Even Jim discards his little suitcase along the road to the arena:  I suppose this is because it is too heavy and he doesn’t really need any of it anyway.  It’s very much an “Everyman” moment (the medieval miracle play, that is).

Another instance in the film when expectations over possessions (and social hierarchy) get a nice peripetetic slap in the face is when Jamie returns home after being separated from his parents and his Chinese Nanny slaps him as she and another older house servant were carting away some piece of furniture.  This was an appropriate reaction considering earlier in the film he said to her “You have to do what I tell you.”  Little Jamie was a little rich prick, let’s admit it. Maybe not the worst ever, but nonetheless a little rich prick.  They were taking some of his possessions but, really it was all worthless anyway.  He had an entire house full of rich things, but when the food ran out he had to leave.  Expensive dressers and pianos won’t fill your belly.

But, Jamie/Jim possessed a quality that was truly remarkable:  resilience.  He managed to take every situation he was in and make the best of it.  He pushed on and on and on.  And in the end, it worked out for him, but not after much suffering, and sometimes worse, watching the suffering of others.

Jim also showed genuine compassion for everyone:  for his young Japanese Kamikaze-in-training friend, for the doctor and his patients, and for Mrs. Victor (among others).  Going from Jamie-the-prick, to Jim-the-resilient-and-compassionate-human-being is really an amazing feat for a 10-14 year old boy.

I think what made Jim such a remarkable character was how true he was to himself.  He was resilient, compassionate, AND he respected the universal idea of, I suppose I can call it, heroism.  By this, I mean he respected the Japanese pilots for what they were:  heroes.  Even though he was not on their “political” side (I think, because children do not truly grasp such complicated concepts as politics and war), it was obvious throughout the film that Jim was someone who loved planes and loved anyone who flew one.

Jamie had an innocence about him based on being raised in a particular socio-economic class, in that he didn’t know any better because he was taught to act in a particular way. But Jim had another, more developed innocence (if that can be considered not an oxymoron) about him that kept him true to a purer sense of humanity because he was struggling along with everyone else, but he still had the seeds of himSelf (the Self that is inherently good and compassionate) and his interests (aviation & planes) without the expected, and highly developed biases of adulthood.

Spielberg did a good job presenting this little boy’s story.

I would like to add something to this post (1/10/09):

Duly noted is Jim/Jamie’s love of planes and flying. Jim/Jamie is played by a young Christian Bale. 

Also duly noted is how Christian Bale plays Dieter Dengler in Werner Herzog’s film, Rescue Dawn.  Dieter Dengler loved planes and flying also.  AND, planes got Dieter in a lot of trouble, like Jim/Jamie (remember, it was Jamie going back for his little plane that cuased him to get separated from his mother!) Werner Herzog also made a documentary about Dieter Denger called Little Dieter Needs to Fly (which I haven’t seen).

So, as SL and I were discussing: I wonder whether Herzog cast Bale as Dengler to capitalize on his earlier role.  Maybe, maybe not.

Either way, I think it’s awesome how things are connected in interesting ways like this.

http://electricbookaloo.wordpress.com/

Jamal got his education from (as they say where I’m from) The School of Hard Knocks.  Jamal, Salim & Latika’s stories were sad, and the film is a testament to the results of living a hard life while attempting to remain true to your character.  Jamal and Salim’s relationship was a travesty, but the viewer could clearly see Salim was destined for the “end” he dealt himself.  And, Jamal was a good boy from the beginning:  highly compassionate and organically pure.

In a way, Slumdog reminded me of Antonio Gramsci’s idea of the organic intellectual.  Not in the strictest sense, because I think Gramsci was going for something a little different, but similar enough here to prove that this Slumdog could defy the odds by answering specialized questions based on his own specialized life experiences.  Definitely an interesting concept to work out onscreen.

I think what was shocking in this film was the presentation of oppression and poverty. Despite all of the slums and garbage and child slavery, I think one of the most disturbing aspects of the film was when Jamal was being tortured by the police:  because at the very heart of his interrogation/torture was the belief the HE could not possibly have known the answers and was cheating somehow.  In Jamal’s case, the inference that he was lying or cheating got him tortured.  But the saddest part is that it was a lifetime of torture and anguish that got him to the point where he could answer those particular questions correctly. Anyway, being tortured for just knowing what you know is an affront to intelligence in general.  And, being accused of cheating just because you know something that someone else doesn’t think you should know, is equally disgraceful.

I think part of what it comes down to is dumb luck.  Dumb luck got him into trouble growing up, and dumb luck got him 20,000,000 rupees.  But, what Jamal knew, as a human being, is what got him to where he was:  just like for the rest of us.

So, at the end of the day when all the smarties or richies of the world think they have the monopoly on things, I think we should remember that we’re all a product of our upbringing and the collective experiences we’ve had over the course of our individual lives:  the opportunities we took advantage of and those we were denied.  We all have different things to bring to the table and each of our lives is worth just as much as everyone else’s regardless of whether we’re from the Slum, the Hill, or the Trailer Park. 

Gretchen Wilson, the country singer, says it best in her song, “Redneck Woman”:

“Cause I’m a redneck woman
I ain’t no high class broad
I’m just a product of my raisin’
I say, ‘hey ya’ll’ and ‘yee-haw’
And I keep my Christmas lights on
On my front porch all year long
And I know all the words to every Charlie Daniels song
So, here’s to all my sisters out there keeping it country
Let me get a big ‘hell yeah’ from the redneck girls like me
Hell yeah
Hell yeah”

So, what did I learn from The Kite Runner?  That issues in the present, if they are not addressed in the present, only worsen and repeat.  In other words, why put off to tomorrow what you can do today? 

I think we can all relate to the dilemma Amir was in when he witnessed Hassan’s rape: he didn’t know what to do, and he reacted in a way that projected his shame over his own cowardice onto Hassan.  The end result was that Hassan already felt “dirty” about what had happened, and just took the injustice dealt to him by Amir when he was accused of stealing.  One has to ask, however, what would have been the result if Amir had told his father of the assault?  Would it have brought public shame onto the house?  This reminds me of another film (I’m drawing a blank on the title but it’s contemporary Italian and deals with the results of exposing such shame on a wealthy family), in which a very elaborate scheme is concocted in order to protect one of the characters from the repercussions of her exposing that another character (a wealthy aristocrat’s son) had been raping children under his care. 

Needless to say, in a more conservative culture like Afghanistan (in all eras presented in the film), I doubt it would have turned out very well for Hassan had Amir exposed the crime.  But, the viewer is still left hoping that Amir will tell Hassan he knows and that he is sorry, or that he would have had the courage to stop the crime from happening at all.  But that never comes, and it is exactly that ethical malfeasance that turns into the guilt that can be felt by the viewer.  And it is exactly that ethical malfeasance that allows for the same atrocity to be perpetuated on Hassan’s own son, Sohrab.  It was gut-wrenching to learn that Sohrab was in the same situation as his father had been, by the same person–the ultimate irony–and while Amir did exact him from the situation, the question still remains as to whether he has atoned for the original sin?

The problem, I suppose, is with at least a few things:  reciprocation in friendship, courage, guilt, and ethics/compassion.  Amir lacked courage and he knew it, but it doesn’t seem like his father truly instilled any courage in him, only scolded him for being a disgrace.  Ethics and compassion are something you learn, and Baba seemed very selfish and self-centered with whatever politics he was involved in, so clearly he didn’t instill in Amir how to “do the right thing.”  This then affects the reciprocation in friendship–Hassan was clearly the better friend, and Amir showed emotional immaturity in the face of Hassan’s clear maturity.  Ironically, Amir knew right from wrong, or his guilt wouldn’t have been palpable by the viewer.  But his guilt never built up enough to open up the flood gates of compassion for his friend. I say this because while Amir saved Sohrab, he did not save Hassan, nor does he ever acknowledge Hassan’s “sacrifice” for him, based purely on principle.

I can’t help but think of the Dalai Lama’s text, Ethics for the New Millennium, where he says it’s not so much that you react perfectly compassionately to every situation, but rather that you practice having a compassionate response.  I suppose Amir gets better at having non-selfish responses to ethical dilemmas by the end when he rescues Sohrab in Afghanistan and when he finally stands up to his father-in-law back in California.  So I think the Dalai Lama would praise Amir for that.

In the film, Baba said that the ultimate crime was theft, that it was the crime that all other crimes are linked to, and yet it is the one that everyone is guilty of in this film, except Hassan (and his father): Baba, Amir, the Russians, the Taliban.   What do we do about all of this theft of innocence, dignity, compassion, and culture?  Because ultimately, all is stolen from everyone in this film, and ultimately the theft of the innocence of Afghanistan is the framing plot.  Why do we keep stealing when we should be getting better at having compassionate responses to others?  Why do we keep “raping” when our conscience tells us it’s wrong?  Why do we not heal the original wounds, and keep letting new and similar wounds develop?  No one with any “say” is learning anything and tomorrow we’ll be in the same predicament as today unless someone does something about it. 

But as the Dalai Lama says, compassion is something that occurs on an individual basis:  I must practice reacting compassionately every time .  I must “nip” my own festering sores in the “bud” and not let them metastacize into other cancers.  I suppose what I’ve learned from this film is that ethical dilemmas occur on the micro- and macro- levels.  Much like our good friend, Shakespeare, with his play-within-a-play, the micro- in this film sheds light on the macro-.  Despite that obviousness Mr. Bard, we’ll never learn, we’ll never learn!

I’ll just say a few things about a few of the films I’ve watched recently, because over time the profundity of my impressions have faded. Is profundity a word?  Irregardless….

Open Your Eyes(1997) Directed by Alejandro Amenabar, starring Penelope Cruz and Eduardo Noriega:  This film is a little bit The Jacket (2005, w/Adrien Brody) mixed with a little Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind(2004, w/ Jim Carrey), with A LOT of Philip K. Dick’s 1923 novel, Ubik.   A fascinating (SF-esque) movie that plays with the protagonist’s, and the viewer’s, sense of reality. 

A Clockwork Orange (1971), Dir. Kubrick:  I thought I had seen this film before, but clearly I hadn’t.  What I liked about this film was Kubrick’s presentation of how society (and therefore the family) deals with poor parenting and poor adherence to acceptable social values.  One social value that is clearly perverted in the film is [avoidance of] violence:  rape, juvenile delinquency/hoodlumery (that’s a new word I’m coining), unethical treatment of prisoners, and the mob mentality.  What struck me throughout the film was that Alex was brought up in an unaffectionate household, he perpetuated violent un-affection in the world, and instead of remaining incarcerated, he was recirculated into the world by a method of ultimate cruelty and un-affection for the individual.  Just another clear instance of ripping an individual’s autonomy away for perversely experimental reasons.  I couldn’t help but think of Guantanamo Bay during the 2nd half of the film.

The White Diamond (2004), Dir. Werner Herzog:  I suppose all Herzog documentaries can be called ‘classically Herzogian,’ and this one is no exception.  An interesting story about one man’s desire to launch an airship (a much smaller version of the infamous Zeppelin-style airship) down in Guyana, the haunting history of his prior attempt, some spectacular rainforest footage, and always some interesting people to awkwardly focus in on.  I love how Herzog narrates his documentaries, revealing little (sometimes awkward or embarassing) details about the people he’s filming, and how he hones in on the everyday people that he finds while on-location.  This documentary has one such everyday person:  Marc Anthony with his trusty rooster.  Herzog spent a lot of time on Marc Anthony, and I think it’s people like Marc Anthony who make Herzog documentaries work on a truly human level.

D.A.R.Y.L. (1985).  What a great movie!  I saw this as a child and wanted to see it again.  A young boy is really part robot and he is taken in by a foster family when one of his scientist-creators escaped the Lab with him.  It is a story of love and the-right-thing-to-do.  You can’t beat that!

Sunshine (2007), starring Cillian Murphy:  An interesting doomsday, SF film.  Plot resembles Armageddon (1998) and all the other doomed-earth films.  Cool effects with the sun.  Didn’t like some of the other cinematography.

What I liked was the plot.  I think this film does what Babel cannot:  show the TRUE interconnectivity between people who “seem” to have no connection with each other, other than being purely human.  (As a side note, I have always severely disliked Babel and apparently find any opportunity available to me to point out how bad the film is).  This is a laudable goal for a director to convey to the masses:  that despite our seeming differences, we are all human and we should all be working WITH each other, not against each other.  In the film, working together accomplished more than anyone could have ever imagined.

The plot led the viewer through the interconnectivity between the people in the film. The Mammoth Hunters were connected with the first African tribe by one man (D’Leh’s father), and the father then created the next connection with “Egypt.”  But it was D’Leh that got the ball rolling as far as bringing everyone together to free the captured slaves.  And, the Mammoth Hunters were connected with the group of Egyptian slaves by their similar prophecies, both of which turned out to be individuals from the Mammoth Hunter tribe.  This shows how one group of people is integral to another’s survival, or even well being.  And, ultimately all groups of people are integral to the survival of everyone.

The only downside to the film is that it’s very difficult to figure out where the Mammoth Hunters are from, and the viewer tends to want to know (or be able to figure out) those things.  They appear to be Near or Middle Eastern???  But they do not cross any major waterways until they get to what I assume is the Nile River.  They cannot be coming from the “East.”  And, because they run into a bunch of African tribes, and they are traveling toward Egypt, they must have originated in the Southern part of Africa.  Really, the geography doesn’t add up, and neither does their “ethnicity.”  So, one must simply chock this up to fiction and not worry about who they are or where they came from. It’s not a “true” story.  And, the mountain shots seem to have been filmed in New Zealand, and other shots filmed in South Africa, so go figure.

Either way, it was an enjoyable film with a nice love story, a story of one man’s (D’Leh’s father)misunderstood devotion to his people, and an unexpected Hero (D’Leh) who rises from the ashes of cowardice to free many people from many different “tribes” and restore confidence in his own people.  In the end, the Hero takes down even the “God” in order to set the people free.  A miracle, truly.

Pleasantly surprised, I was.  Small world, it is, that we live in. Figure out who the “God” represents, we must.  Work together to take him down, we shall.

Equally powerful was the scene when the Priest introduces the two Natives to The Bible, or the Word of God as they put it.  When the male Native puts the book up to his ear to “hear” the word of God, thereby not reacting the way he “should have,” they kill him and the Priest says “It’s so difficult to convert the Natives.” 

What this says to me is that the purpose of “converting” was not so much to help the Natives “understand” the Word of God, but just to impose power and control over them.  Obivously, history has proven this awful truth over and over again. 

I find it interesting that Aguirre, once he causes Ursua to be shot (therefore it is a mutiny), that he does not take control of the expedition, but rather stays as second-in-command to Guzman whom is appointed “Emperor of El Dorado.”  First of all, it is absurd to be the Emperor of a place you haven’t even found yet.  This goes to show how hubristic the leadership of this party is, like all Colonizers are, I suppose.  As the film rolls on, Guzman begins cataloguing all of his new lands (as he writes in his ledger on the boat), declaring that pretty much everything that is along the river is his.  Well, not too much later the river doesn’t become his, but he becomes part of the river in a fitting peripatetic moment of divine justice.  Instead of cleansing his soul of its sins (in the confession box), he cleanses his bowels in the makeshift latrine on the boat, and after he emerges, he is shot with a Native’s arrow and found dead by his shipmates.  No salvation for Guzman!

In fact, there is no salvation for anyone on that expedition (except perhaps the women–one who is adamantly against Aguirre’s plot, and the other who sits there like a good girl should and does nothing???).  So drunk with a megalomaniacal sense of power, Aguirre declares (to the monkeys) that HE is the wrath of god and that he will marry his own daughter in order to found a pure race.  His earlier insistence on staying second-in-command speaks to his parallel belief that he is the “wrath” of god, and not god himself.  I interpret the wrath of god to be that part of god’s personality or character that keeps men on the Old Testament straight path–the part that causes plagues and floods, and punishes the unworthy.  But in his hubristic delusion, he fails to see the obvious–that he is just a soldier of Spain in search of a non-existent utopia. 

I suppose we should think of Hitler here, who despite his own low cultural/social status, was able to transcend to a god-like status.  Perhaps that is too obvious a connection.  Or we could think of ourselves and our own delusions of grandeur, and the ways in which “we” (i.e. our own societies: past, present & future) exploit and “enslave” others in order to perfect our own sense of power. 

Whichever it is, it seems to me that Herzog is telling us to look at the absurdity of the situations presented in this film and try to make sense of it in our world.  Like Shakespeare gives us a play-within-a-play to give perspective to the characters he is writing into life, Herzog gives us a film within the diegesis of our lives to give us perspective on our own absurd notions of power, religion, culture, civilization, and just plain living.

I couldn’t help but think of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto as I was watching this film–as that film ends, so this one begins, in a sense.

I think that’s an important message to convey because today we’re in that same situation–big businesses are profiting relentlessly from the exploitation of those who have nothing. In an era when private companies’ CEOs get massive payoffs from government bailouts, it’s hard to see or appreciate the humanitarian compassion being extended to the people through the fog of multi-million dollar CEO settlements. 

Dr. Hendron had it right when he kept Stanton off the ship–had he been allowed to go to the new planet, he would have tainted it all with his diabolical, greedy, paranoid existence.

I will say that the very end of the film perplexed me, however.  When they land the ship safely on Zyra, the pilot (David Randall) opens up the airlock to an unknown atmosphere even after being warned by Dr. Drake that they needed to test the atmosphere first.  Randall’s response was something like: “It’s the only atmosphere we’ve got so we might as well go out in it.” 

To me, this was totally idiotic.  To have put so much effort into getting there, and then to risk it on a whim, was ludicrous and shows Randall’s incapacity to truly lead.  But everyone on the ship was fine with that–they had resigned themselves to die, I suppose, should the atmosphere be toxic.  Of course what they found was utopic.

I wonder if Dr. Hendron had been with them, if he would have insisted on taking better precautions in an authoritative, fatherly sort of way.  He did, essentially, sacrifice himself for the betterment of the 40 on the spaceship; knowing that, I have a hard time thinking he’d be alright with just opening the airlock.

At the very least it shows they are probably prone to future troubles.

But, I remembered it enough to know it was creepy–I mean who can deny wanting to watch people exploit other people by locking them in the basement?!  Craven created a recipe for success with that plotline, is all I’ve got to say!

I was surprised to see two actors from Twin Peaks in there!  (Currently I’m watching the full series with friends).  The man who played “Man/Dad” in Stairs also played Big Ed in Twin.  And Big Ed’s crazy monocle wife, Nadine, played “Woman/Mom” in Stairs.  What a crazy pair!  Perfectly cast.

The film did not disappoint.  It was suspenseful AND funny.  The funniest parts were with “Man/Dad” who would come out wearing a full-body bondage outfit (black leather with silver buckles, etc.) and would shoot up the house with his shotgun, yelling after “Mamma,” which was really his sister.  Something about the insinuation of brother-sister incest just makes you laugh. And the fact that they were uber-conservative “Christian” cannibals just made it all the more funny.

But ridiculousness aside, this film had a message. One need not break out the Enigma machine to decipher Craven’s code:  that rich, white, incestuous capitalists are literally devouring the inner-city ghettos, viciously consuming human lives and throwing the scraps down to their helpless prisoners whom they force to partake of their abominable crimes. 

But the question then becomes:  are WE those prisoners, kept under the stairs, shackled by flimsy boards and given flashlights to see our limited way around in the darkness?  Sure, why not.  Are we like Alice, being beaten day in and day out for trying to abide by the “see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil” edicts of our oppressive “parents”?  Sure, why not.  Even seventeen years later, we’re still witnessing ravenous big businesses out there ripping poor people, and middle class people, and everyone else, to shreds with their financial schemes. 

Is it really us, and not the boy-hero in The People Under the Stairs, who have accepted the nickname of Fool, even today?  Sure, why not.  One day we’ll wake up and realize that we’ve been living under the stairs all this time, and knowing about Plato’s Cave hasn’t helped us a bit.

And I will add that the filmed adaptation of 2010 was bad, really really bad.  I had higher hopes. Oh well.

Nonetheless, I have just finished reading 3001 and I thought I’d share my thoughts on the series of four books.  I don’t want to comment on each of them individually, but instead, just general comments about the whole lot.

I will note here that though 3001 is called The Final Odyssey, Clarke ends this one typically, by leaving it open-ended and ominous.  Well, he passed on to the other side this year so he won’t be writing a sequel to fill in the gaps, so as readers we must do our best to project, based on what’s come prior, what will happen with the presumably ‘Big Daddy Monolith,’ as I will call it, in the ‘Last Days,’ as he refers to them.

I started reading 2001: A Space Odyssey  back in the late Spring, early Summer of this year.  Perhaps I had heard of Clarke’s recent death.  I cannot say for sure.  But, I read it in the hopes of shedding some light on what the heck went on in the last part of Kubrick’s parallel film (1968).  I had seen the film a few times and just could not put my finger on what was happening.  It doesn’t help that those final scenes lull you to sleep with all the stars coming at you like a mind trip.  And yes, the book resolved the issues in my mind about the ending with Dave Bowman and the ‘Star Child.’ Very satisfying. 

So I continued reading.  What struck me about the first text was that it was so clear that human intelligence was something that had been affected, or even Effected, by the Monolith when it came to earth 4 million years ago.  The fact that human intelligence had to be coaxed out of its primitive stages by an unknowable entity (and it remained truly unknowable, even by the end of 3001 when mankind had attempted to interfere with it for self-preservation), was fascinating to me.  It really puts the idea of human ingenuity to test. 

The great thing about Clarke’s writing is that it is so highly scientific that it seems and feels plausible.  In fact, at the end of most of the books is a recap of scientific advancement since their first publishing. 

True Science Fiction is amazing.  That blend of real science, humanity and the unknown but somehow fathomable future is a truly remarkable way of dealing with life and death in the now. 

That’s what I like so much about Clarke’s Odyssey series.  It seems so unreal, and it is, but at the same time the story engrosses you so much that you just NEED to find out what happens.  It is more surreal than anything–something delicately balanced under our own sense of reality, but so nearly real that it sucks you in and forces you to contemplate the possibilistic.  That is a mark of great fiction–when the unreal forces you to contemplate the real as analogs.

I have yet to read The Lost Worlds of 2001, which I’m sure will be a nice addendum to the Odyssey series.  And I have Clarke’s highly acclaimed Rendezvous With Rama waiting for me on the kitchen table. 

So here’s to you Frank Poole, Halman, Tsienville, Dr. Heywood Floyd, and the unseen yet immanently anticipated Big-Daddy-Monolith of the future.  May those of us who are here now help answer the question of whether we’ll all (or at least partially) be spared with It comes for us 1,500+ years hence.  In the meantime, perhaps we can rectify Clarke’s prediction in 3001 that the Twenty-First Century was one of the most horrific in history.  Deus save us all. Deus give us strength.  Deus ex macchina….?  Clarke would have us believe so!  An interesting thought to resolve in the interim millennia.

It is an interesting concept for a super hero though:  a regular person with no “unnatural” abilities, except for a genius-level mind and a penchant for MacGyver’esque engineering-oneself-out-of-tough-spots.  Brilliant concept, really.  Use your own skills to transcend human abilities.  Supposedly we should feel empowered by this because we’re all, technically, capable if we put our minds to it.  The Iron Man website describes this as “using his intelligence and ingenuity.”  Something, in my opinion, is in deficit in our world. 

Using our own weaponry against us is not a new idea.  The other interesting facet of this film was its setting (in the beginning in Afghanistan) and the way the “rebels” were trying to outwit the witless.  I say witless because the title character, Tony Stark, was completely oblivious of his own company’s dealings.  And, even worse, he was certainly out-of-the-loop on the plot for his own assassination.  But, he ended up outwitting them all–he’s so intelligent and ingenious.  The sad part is that this film is just another nail in the coffin as far as cultural stereotypes go.  One man is so much more intelligent than the whole lot of men he encounters.  Hmm…you fill in the blanks.

I was happy to see that there were no grossly over-forced sex scenes (though the sexual tension could certainly be cut with a knife) between Stark and his assistant, Pepper (Paltrow).  At least Hollywood Blockbuster filmmakers are finally clueing in about throwing needless sex in there…oh wait, Stark DID have sex with someone in the film…immaterial to the plot, truly. 

I did notice that Pepper had reddish-strawberry-blonde hair, much like our other Stan Lee ‘heroine,’ MJ from Spiderman.  That was interesting.  I wonder if Stan Lee likes red heads?

Perhaps a little too blindly servile, Pepper, though clearly a good girl character, represents those qualities in women that should be extinct and not venerated on the big screen.  By this I mean that women are still being portrayed as “I’ll do whatever you say, whenever you say it, because secretly I want to be more than just your servant” types.  While Pepper takes charge at the end to usher in a saving-of-the-day, one has to wonder why she’d suffer a life of servitude with a character like Tony Stark in the first place if she’s got her wits about her.  I suppose we’re supposed to remember, as women, that we should put up with whatever it takes to be in the mere presence of a man of “intelligence and ingeniousness.”  Clearly Pepper’s got intelligence and ingeniousness of her own.  But for whatever reason, she’s stuck around with this womanizer, amoral douchebag for 7(?) years.

Of course, Mr. Stark completely turns his morals around by the end. So I suppose even corrupt capitalists can be reformed.  Or in the case of his evil nemesis, Obadiah, you get killed eventually because your power-hungryness consumes even yourself.  Enron executives come to mind. So who’s next?  Recently we have many examples of greedy folks raking in the money at everyone else’s expense….

Herzog presents a picture very near the white-black segregation of the 1950s in America with scenes of Nazis insulting Jews and Jews just sitting there and taking it, not realizing the extent of their future misery.   And by the end of the film, when Zishe returns home to Poland and tries to rally his fellow Polish Jews, he is unsuccessful at convincing them that the German Nazis are a potential problem.  Standing there at the town’s water pump, Zishe’s attempt to introduce his community to what we now know was Hitler’s “Big Lie”–the unimaginable truth of the catastrophic threat against Jews.  But Zishe was just as unsuccessful at convincing them before it had even begun, as the rest of the world stood unconvinced of the extent of the atrocity by the time the war had ended–no one could believe the extent to which the Nazis would go to cleanse their race and culture of what they deemed impurities.  Even today it is hard to fathom.

There is a scene in the theatre of the Occult where Zishe (the enormous Polish Jew) throws off his Aryan-Nordic-Roman garb, states his real name and creed, and declares himself the new Jewish Samson.  The segregated crowd (Nazis on the left side of the aisle and Jews on the right side of the aisle) erupt in their various blasphemes and praises, respectively.  It is a powerful moment; one precipitated by Zishe’s little brother’s earlier comment about how he was surprised how much he had changed.  But while Zishe had temporarily donned a false identity, he found himself in the process.

Sadly, in finding himself, he also loses himself.  But therein lies the beauty of the story.  When the idea of “Samson” was brought up in the film for the first time (as Zishe walks through the countryside and a girl who calls herself “Delilah” comes up), I wondered what would be Zishe’s proverbial Samson “hair.” 

Well, at the end of the film, it turns out to be something very simple and unexpected.  And that makes it all-the-more gut-wrenching.  A small cut on such an enormous and “pure” figure brought about his downfall.  The saddest part of the whole film was that Zishe’s suffering represents the large gash that would later mar the Jews.  But it turns out he was posthumously praised as a hero of the Jews, so we must take some consolation from that.

A beautiful movie. And sad.  Some tender moments of human purity.  Zishe was kind, loving, innocent, hard-working, faithful, caring, and misunderstood.  One normal, everyday man can’t possibly have deterred another man’s atrocities before they had even happened.  But after-the-fact, as Herzog has shown us, we can relish in the thought that Zishe tried.  Sweet Zishe.

I was entirely expecting to see a campy horror film in this 80s remake, and while there were perhaps moments of camp, overall the film did not displease in that over-campish sort of way. 

The blob itself was a sickening wretch of a life-form, devouring (or rather disintegrating) everyone in its path.  It was gross, bulbous, gelatinous, and cellulitic.  There were moments that were truly suspenseful, and down-right, moderately frightening.  I can see how, if I had seen parts of this film when I was much younger, I would have certain images imprinted on my brain.  For example, I’ve always wondered why I cringe and near-vomit at the sight of a clogged-up drain, and why you couldn’t pay me money to use my own hands to un-clog it…well, now I know!  Thank god for Drain-o!  In the film, they could’ve used some Blob-o.

Clearly this film had a purpose–fear of scientific progress for purposes of anti-peace.  It’s amazing how many films, even today (I’m thinking of I Am Legend at the moment–granted, that was based on a book from 1954) deal with our fears about the effects of science on humanity.  This is certainly relevant today with the rampant fear and uncertainty surrounding stem cell research and cloning; not to mention whatever other scientific things are out there that the General Public don’t know (or want to know) about.

But, in The Blob, those things came right into small town America and hit us where it would hurt the most: on proverbial Main Street.  What would you do if men in white suits came to your town to quarantine you?  Most people would believe the men-in-white.  But in this film, trusting the men in charge is a treacherous issue.  When out-of-control scientific experiements start affecting our sleepy little towns, who are we going to rely on to save us?  It’s not the men-in-white.  No, it’s two, regular high school students.  More than that, it’s two of the most venerated character-types we know:  The All-American girl and the Rebel (seemingly) without a cause.

What I really liked about the film was the way the characters were used–the persistent goody-two-shoes cheerleader with a nose for “what’s right” (Meg, played by Shawnee Smith), and the no-good bad boy with a harder-to-tease-out penchant for helping others (Brian, played by Kevin Dillon).  Both of them came together, despite their “class” and “cultural” differences, to save their town.  Both ultimately acted selflessly for the good of others.  And both prevailed in the end.  Well, at least they got really lucky.  Many times throughout the film, Brian would save Meg and then get in a jam and Meg would come and save Brian!  A perfect duo: fighting an out-of-control scientific experiment one heroic event after another.  So if Meg and Brian can prevail over the man-made Blob, what can the rest of us accomplish?

This was an enjoyable film. Not too scary, but suspenseful enough.  Not too campy, but with enough cheese-factor to make you want to watch it.  Not too out-of-this-world to not be relevant even today, twenty years later.

Suspiria came highly recommended.  A friend from grad school recommended it to me a few years ago and I have just now gotten around to watching it.  What can I say: I’m slow.

Was it worth the wait?  Well, let’s see….

I’ve never quite experienced a film like Suspiria.  I say this because the sound track, by the group Goblin, is so pronounced that it invades your mind and heightens your senses because you are so annoyed by the grating cacophony of sound that it’s hard to not be tense while you’re watching the film.  In this way, the film was very interactive–your brain could not escape the sound unless you completely turned it off.

As far as the story itself goes, it was an interesting concept:  a ballet school with a coven of witches at its center.  But I wasn’t frightened out of my seat by the turn of events or the plotline.  The viewer never really knows why young Suzy Bannion is drugged with wine (and is left all alone in the last few scenes while all the other girls are in town)–the only explanation here is to contrive a situation where Suzy explores the school and finds the secret den of witches.  A little too forced, and not overly organic in terms of letting things fall into place in a more believable fashion.

You also never really know why the other girls were so suspicious of what was going on (therefore leading to their deaths).  You want to think that maybe they recruit new girls to the ballet school so that they can somehow either turn them into witches or sacrifice them, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.  The two girls who die are killed because they know the secret of the witches (or they know there’s something sinister going on), not because they’re being sacrificed or something.

And the male ballet dancers, one in particular–Daniel–seems to be incahoots with the witches, but that is never resolved. 

I can’t say much about the film other than it is dark and typically Italian in terms of Horror.  The plot doesn’t win any awards for creativity in my book–but I’d say that goes for most Italian Horror that I’ve seen.  But the music adds a particularly interesting element to the film.  And the creepyness factor of witches running a school with an ancient ghostly-Greek witch living in the basement is, in itself, inherently unnerving.

One must always be patient with Italian films.  Perhaps upon a second viewing, I will appreciate it more for Argento’s artistry.

What stands out about this film to me isn’t the sophsticated plotline or character development, but the mere fact that it is a vehicle for Jane Fonda and sex.  Much like my thoughts on Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C., Barbarella clearly was a way to show off Miss Fonda’s attributes and her highly-developed acting skills.  Of course, I’m being ironic here (with the highly-developed acting skills part).

It also seems plausible that the film was a vehicle to broadcast the cultural acceptability of promiscuous sex and male sexual dominance (in its many variations–the scene with Fonda and Hemmings shows the viewer an alternative to the other instances of Barbarella’s promiscuity, and the trope of male sexual dominance–and thus female sexual submissiveness–that runs throughout).

The way Barbarella spread herself around amongst the men she encounters is interesting–no one can escape an encounter with her, not even the viewer, who in the first few moments of the film, is treated to a very intimate moment of voyeuristic pleasure.

In the same vein, the way she breaks the ‘death-by-pleasure’ machine shows the extent to which the viewer is to become enrapt in her sex appeal–she is so sexually resilient that she’ll wear you out before she does. 

I call it promiscuity because Barbarella immediately sleeps with the men she encounters–sometimes as repayment for help, sometimes because she wants to (because she’s now obsessed with the idea of intercourse after having been ‘starved’ of it).

Perhaps it is showing how “powerful” Barbarella is, that she can take charge of her sexuality and her self by lording it over the men.

But I doubt that. Rather, Barbarella is almost always in a submissive position:  in the beginning, she is totally naked, being viewed by her “boss” on the telescreen who is completely clothed–she asks, should I put on some clothes, and he, of course, says ‘no, don’t worry about it’; then when she encounters the man on the ice she lays down waiting for him to assume a dominant position on her–she is naked, he is clothed until he reveals his grossly hairy chest–the ULTIMATE male, I suppose; when she is in the ecstacy-machine, she is literally pinned in by Durand Durand who essentially molests her with the machine, but much to her delight and pleasure–so forced pleasure is still acceptable, I suppose; and when she is with the Angel, she is in a submissive position, waiting for him, greatly desiring what he can give her. 

At least when she is with Hemmings’ character (who was a great character, by the way), and they’re sitting up and touching hands, they are both on equal terms.  I would like to note, however, that when she is having this moment of ecstacy with Hemmings’ character, it is clear that she is getting no pleasure, but he is–he is still mid-climax and she is already bored and has taken her hands away from his.  Perhaps this is making a comment about female-sexual-satisfaction-at-the-expense-of-ensuring-male-sexual-satisfaction.  It’s almost like she’s lying there, waiting for him to finish.

So it appears that either Barbarella is being dominated, or is just waiting for it to be over with.  Neither bodes well, I’m afraid.

Doesn’t lead me to believe sex means power for women.  Just the opposite, in fact.

My initial reaction was shock at the naked Fonda.  But now I see what it was all for: just another rung in the ladder of female suppression.  I suppose I’m just as guilty of objectifying her as the patriarchal culture that finds (and makes) it acceptable–I did watch the film.

I always like to use Troy as an example of a horrible literature-to-film adaptation.  In 2004 I hadn’t even read the Iliad yet but from taking a Classical Drama course, where I learned about the Trojan war through Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, I knew the film was lacking.

So, it’s now 2008 and I decided to watch the film again, to give it another try.  I’ve since read The Iliad, The Odyssey, and the Aeneid multiple times. 

The second time around was actually more excruciating than the first.  There are so many narrative inconsistencies between the “facts” of the Trojan War, and what Peterson presents to the viewer. A few are listed below:

-Patroklos, in the Iliad, is described more like an uncle or friend to Achilles, but in the film he is a nephew of Achilles.

-Ajax is killed almost immediately in the film, but in the narrative of the war “myth” itself, he commits suicide after Achilles’ death.

-The time frame presented in the film makes it appear to have a diegetic time frame of about a month (who can tell really), when in actuality the war lasted between 9-10 years.

-No mention of Helen’s daughter (Hermione) in the film.

-Hektor refers to knowing something’s up with Paris on the boat when they were sailing home from Sparta, by saying something to the effect of “when you were ten years old, you came to me with that same guilty look when you stole father’s horse” or something like that; when in actuality, Paris and Hektor didn’t grow up together because Paris was techically an orphaned son of Priam and Hecuba who came into their lives much later, after the “Judgment of Paris” where he chose Aphrodite (because his prize from her was Helen!) over Hera and Athena.  No mention of that in the film. It makes it seem like they grew up together. They didn’t.

-Briseis kills Agamemnon in the film, which is entirely WRONG because Agamemenon is killed by his wife (Clytemnestra) and her lover (Aegisthus) when he returns home after the 9-10 year war was over.

-Hektor kills Meneleus in the film, which is wrong also because we know from the Odyssey that Meneleus and Helen leave Troy and get detained in Egypt for a while, and don’t return home until 7 years after the end of the war.

-Agamemnon kills Priam in the film, which is wrong.  Priam is actually killed by Neoptolemus/Pyrrhus (a son of Achilles).  Matter of fact, it is a NASTY death for Priam at the hands of Neoptolemus–Virgil documents it well in the Aeneid.

-The viewer is led to believe Achilles has no children (because his mother, Thetis, in the beginning of the film) says he COULD HAVE a wife and kids, OR fame and infamy.  It’s true Achilles chooses a short but infamous life over a long and happy life, but he already has kids–we know this because one of his kids, Neoptolemus/Pyrrhus is old enough to fight by the time the war has ended (9-10yrs after it started).

-And, at the end of the film when Paris is helping usher the Trojans out of the city through the tunnel, he looks to a young boy who is helping an old man along and says: “What’s your name?”  The boy answers “Aeneas.”  And Paris gives him the Sword of Troy and tells him to protect his people.  This interaction makes one believe that Paris and Aeneas had never seen each other in their lives when in fact Aeneas and Paris were cousins.  Aeneas was a warrior in the Trojan War and was married (to Andromache) and had a son (Ascanius/Iulus). At least Peterson got the “old man” on his arm right–that being his father Anchises whom Aeneas bore on his back out of the city in the myth. 

Well, those are just a few of the narrative inconsistencies in the film.  All of which, and more, severely inhibit the enjoyment of this film the second time around.  I was weary to watch it again but thought I’d give it another try.  That didn’t work very well.  I have to admit that some of the worst films I’ve seen star Brad Pitt–Babel and Troy are just bad films overall.

But I have to say the worst part about this film is that overall it is “rewriting” history; granted, it’s “mythical” history, but still.  What we have is a Hollywood appropriation of a set of classical tales.  When such “truths” are rewritten and represented to the modern audience, it rings of cultural manipulation.  What’s the point? Why?  One can only assume that in 2004, Wolfgang Peterson was doing his best to allegorize our own world conflicts at the time (that are still going on today).  And while I can appreciate a certain degree of artistic manipulation, an absolute bastardization of some of the key elements of the stories results in a total annihilation of Peterson’s ethos.

As the film’s final credits roll, a phrase comes up to the effect of “Loosely based on Homer’s Iliad.”  I think I’d rewrite that to say “Barely based on any Truth at all.”

I will say that Eric Bana as Hektor was appealing and appropriate.  Paris was presented as a cowardly weakling, which is true.  And Peter O’Toole as Priam was compassionately played.

I’m not entirely sure why I decided to watch this film other than the fact that the movie poster pretty much draws you in.  I mean, who can resist Raquel Welch with blonde hair in a loin cloth?!  Even I cannot resist that.

As I was watching the film, I was trying to determine what the point of it was:  why?  why? why?  The only answer I could come up with was that it seemed to be an extension of the sword-and-sandal, or peplum, films of the late 1950s/ early 1960s.  Those films dealt with uber-masculine heroes of antiquity; they personified the independent male who seeks female companionship only for pleasure, and who avoids getting suckered into things like marriage or settling down.

But in One Million Years B.C. we don’t have the gross displays of masculinity in the traditional peplum sense, but rather a mixture of brute force (with the dark-haired tribe), and cleverness and intellectual ingenuity on the part of the blonde-haired tribe.  They meet, they clash, they live “happily every after.” 

They aren’t cave-men, but they do live in caves.  One complaint would be that in no way whatsoever was there any “truth” behind the presentation of the dinosaurs and other gargantuan things living alongside human beings at that time (like a giant iguana and tarantula).  So, one must take the film with the grain of salt required to suspend disbelief for a brief moment of enjoyment-for-enjoyment’s sake.

It had little to no dialogue, unless you count grunting and motioning towards things as analogs to dialogue.  They did use a few words, mainly for their Names and for objects.  But otherwise, very little but the annoying musical accompaniment to go along with their gruntings.

Perhaps the worst thing about the film was the music, or rather, racket.  Quite often there would be a weird crackling extra-diegetic din that wouldn’t be associated with anything in particular, but that would be distracting and annoying.  But, if that’s the worst thing about the film, that’s okay.

I suppose they all lived happily ever after in the end and they all figured out how to mesh their two tribes together.  Perhaps we can learn a lesson from this today: eventually, we must get along.

To answer my own question as to why this film was even made at all, I will simply say: Raquel Welch with blonde hair in a loin cloth.

Kurt Cobain: About a Son (2006, different, but very powerful)

Pete’s Dragon (1977, Disney, a classic from my childhood)

Sweeney Todd (2007)

Northern Exposure (1991+, TV series)

Dexter (2006+)

Slings and Arrows (2003+, Canadian TV series about a Shakespeare Festival, fun)

The Seventh Seal (1957)

Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982)

Taxi Driver (1976)

The King of Comedy (1983, DeNiro/Scorsese–VERY funny)

Pi: Faith in Chaos (1998)

Requiem for a Dream (2000, disturbing and nightmare-enducing)

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Into The Wild (2007)

Tideland (2005, creepy Terry Gilliam)

Alan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1987, a classic from my childhood)

This film presented an interesting concept:  outlaws mixing with regular guys mixing with railroad and law men.  Ultimately, what stands out for me are the interactions between Wade (Crowe) and Evans (Bale).  What was striking in this film was the depiction of Wade as the ultimate outlaw “boss” with a string of devoted henchmen who go to great lengths to protect him.  What develops throughout the course of the movie is a similar type of respect developing between Wade and Evans.  And the ending of the film tells the viewer that respect goes a long way with these men-of-the-West.  The lengths to which Wade goes in order to maintain Evans’ honor is equal to the lengths to which Wade’s own men go in order to rescue him from the train to Yuma prison.

Something else that struck me throughout this film was how often people were told not to talk to Wade while they were all sitting around with each other, on the perilous journey to the train.  “Don’t talk to him.”  This draws attention to the fact that Wade was well known for his sly tongue, much like that cunning cat Odysseus who could talk his way out of anything.  Wade is equally dangerous because behind his quick wit are a quick draw and a posse of outlaws (hey, that rhymes).  But over and over again, despite being thrust into the middle of a family dinner table, or a campfire, people were consistently being encouraged to not talk to Wade. 

What is it about insisting upon not talking to the enemy-in-your-midst?  What I figured out by watching the rest of the film was that when “reasonable” people talk to Wade, it becomes obvious that he’s actually almost like a regular guy, with a twist of course.  He’s a cold-blooded killer with a deep-seated pathology (which the viewer and a few of the characters find out is ultimately a result of being abandoned by his mother when he was a very young boy).  He learned to separate survival from emotions–reasonably expected under the given circumstances.

Young William Evans (the oldest son of Bale’s character) is the character who points out, towards the end of the film when they’re all holed up in the hotel, that Wade seems like a nice guy.  After all, he helped them (his captors) escape from the Native Americans who had attacked them, and he didn’t try to escape when they were all fleeing the railroad thugs.  Wade’s response was that if he had a gun, he would have shot them and escaped.

The viewer may have doubts about this–whether Wade would have done that–especially once the final scene has brought things to a close.  Wade’s absolute adherence to his unspoken “word” to Evans–who in an earlier scene had looked Wade in the eyes and said that no one ever thought of him as a hero–proved itself to be a stronger bond than he had with his own henchmen.  In fact, it was his 2nd in command who ended up shooting Evans in the back, not knowing he and Wade had a “deal” to get Wade onto the prisoner’s car. 

But Wade kept his word–he got on the train, and Evans goes down in this film’s diegetic history as the hero who did what no others could do.

But it’s not so much the bond-of-honor that strikes me as profound as much as the allegory I see throughout with Wade–the one no one’s supposed to speak to, who is so abominable and atrocious that merely talking to him will cause your demise, and yet he is the MOST noble, and most honorable of them all (aside from Evans, perhaps, though Evans sought something resembling “glory” where Wade merely followed his code til the end, no “glory” as a goal, just holding tight to one’s word). 

Could it be that Wade represents the ultimate “other” whom we fear for his seeming a-moral otherness?  Where the misconception about “morality” or codes of conduct is at the very heart of the problem?.  Can the problem be in our definition of morality and in our assumption that what appears to be a-moral very well might be the exhibition of the highly moral?  In fact, Wade, despite his outlaw ways, was the individual who exhibited the most “character” and the most venerable qualities based on an inherent system of conduct.  Granted, one can’t brush aside all the murders he was responsible for.  But, can we attempt to respect Wade’s Honor Code for what it is:  his own morality?

This, to me, is also a central concept in No Country for Old Men.  Despite my feelings about the overall quality of the film, as I’ve said in an earlier blog post, Chigurh has a particular Code (or set of morals) that he sticks to:  agree with his code or not, he follows it to a “T.” 

This idea about morals or codes of conduct appears to be a central theme to quite a few films lately.  Even the Joker in The Dark Knight follows his own prescribed set of rules, which I talk a little about on this blog.

Are we moving toward trying to better understand others’ morals and behaviors in an attempt to de-otherize, and put into perspective our different definitions of morality?   It makes me wonder what the ‘absent cause’ is here?  An interesting thought to ponder at least.

All of this talk of morality and codes of conduct reminds me of the TV series, Dexter.  While I haven’t written about it on this blog, I do watch the show.  And Dexter’s set of morals, while perverse on “normal” standards, is still a highly “honorable” set of rules.

In addition to the images of the lengths to which pilgrims are willing to go to in order to mimic the Buddha’s path of absolution, Herzog also presents us with some less-than-appealing images.  Amidst all the enlightenment seekers and their prostrated serenity, there is an ugly side, a greedy side.  We see a man with a trick monkey enslaved by a chain, begging for money.  And worst of all we see common folks ripping ‘gifts’ out of the hands of monks, knocking them over to grab what they can.  This is the ugly side of this Buddhist ceremony.  Doesn’t seem altogether different than any other depiction of mob mentality except that to Westerners, Buddhists are always presented as serene, non-invasive, humane, and uber-enlightened. It seems as though Herzog is merely pulling the Wizard’s screen away to reveal the regular guy behind it all.

Now, of course, that is not to say that the Dalai Lama and his fellow monks and nuns are somehow implicated in any of this basal greed.  In fact, it does not appear as though the Dalai Lama is even aware of the crowd’s greediness.  Turns out he is sick and is unable to perform the rituals of the ceremony and everything gets postponed until next year.

Herzog’s style of documentary filmmaking is fun.  His long pauses on individuals, and the camera’s capture of their squeamishness as a result, are expected, appreciated, and laughable when they come.  His commentary is always raw and ironic, and the viewer can’t help but laugh at the obviousness of his remarks about those he captures on film.  What comes to mind is one of the final shots of the film when nearly everyone has left the Austrian ceremony (because it was over a week before), and there are a few stragglers kneeling on mats and one security guard standing around watching the people intently as if they were dangerous, I suppose.  Herzog’s comment about this was to the effect of:  someone forgot to tell him his shift was over.  Funny.  True.  But also related to those stragglers still kneeling on the floor:  one can’t absorb the essence of the Dalai Lama by osmosis, you know. And a week later would be even more impossible.  Perhaps that was also the mistake of the greedy pilgrims back in India–they thought that by merely being there, they would be cleansed.  

This brings to mind the play “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett.  We can’t just sit around waiting for things to happen to us, expecting or demanding that they happen to us.  We have to be active and do it, live it.  This was Jodorowsky’s main point in The Holy Mountain–see my blog post on it.

I see I’m out of touch just enough to only just now realize how deliberate that connection is–wikipedia covers all bases.

This film definitely reflects a downward spiral, but for my own tastes it fails to live up to the genius of its namesake here. 

I know this film won many awards and grossed a lot of money but the mere presentation of a bizarre, psycho-killer hitman does not a truly awesome film make, in my opinion. 

I felt there were a few deliberate and unnecessary elements to the plot, and there were also other things missing that I think were necessary to the plot.  Only a few are below:

First, why did Llewellyn not just keep going out of town?  Why did he stop at that motel and go through all of that duct-hiding of the suitcase?  It was pointless because then he just kept going anyway.  It seems to me like a cheap attempt by the Coen Brothers to entice the viewer with some suspense. 

And why do the Coen Brothers not show the moments leading up to Llewellyn’s death?  Skip the moving the suitcase from hotel room to hotel room and show us the real stuff that we want to see.

I think Bardem’s character, Chigurh, embodies a personified, modern concept of disembodied violence very well.  I just don’t think the filmmakers did justice to the subject matter (by crafting a truly remarkable plot) in the best way possible.

Bardem’s Oscar is well deserved but I’m just not feeling the film overall in terms of its purported status as a modern cinematic masterpiece.

One thing that strikes me as interesting, however, is Chigurh’s coin-tossing.  This heads-or-tails “choice” that he gives a few of his victims, or potential-victims, is reminiscient of another fan favorite, The Dark Knight. See my own post on this film on my blog.   In The Dark Knight  we have the Joker with his diabolical choice-giving, but we also have Harvey Dent/Two Face with the, I’d say, equally diabolical heads-or-tails (which is really a Janus-like heads-or-heads) toss of the coin.  All three characters give out choices to those around them (their victims sometimes, usually).  And all three characters are perverting the autonomy of those they purport to be “giving a choice” to.  There is no true choice in chance.

It’s the fabricated (or as I referred to it before as contrived) choices that these characters give out that complicate things for those around them.  I appreciate this aspect of the film.

But perhaps I’m just not seeing how it all ties together with the overall plot and the actions of the other characters.  Llewellyn makes deliberate, autonomous choices that get him killed.  Sheriff Bell makes deliberate, autonomous decisions that lead him to the scenes of the crimes.  But what is the cohesive lesson we’re supposed to be getting from this film?  Because it’s obvious to not take a case full of money from a desert-drug-deal-gone-wrong, and then to keep running with the money even after you know you’ve put everyone in danger.

It seems to me that the film was mainly about showing a diabolical killer (Chigurh), a wanna-be bandit (or whatever he is) who gets himself in over his head, and a sheriff who is “too old” to be able to do his job effectively in such a Brave New World.

I feel unfulfilled after watching this film–like I felt about Babel (2006).  Things were connected in that film, but not in a way that was truly thought-provoking.  Things are connected in No Country for Old Men, but I fail to see the point other than presenting a study of a diabolical killing-machine in Chigurh, and an idiot in Llewellyn.

I didn’t realize it when I ordered the film on Netflix, but based on the number of languages available in subtitles and overdubbing, this film must have had quite a world-wide appeal.  Or, at the very least, it has become a classic of Russian cinema. 

It’s a delightful, propagandistically-charged (if that’s even a word) tale of a young, and “well educated” Soviet boy, Volka, who comes across a genie in a bottle, but not quite of the Christina Aguilera type–though Aguilera is the byproduct of exactly what is being presented in this film as socially undesirable. 

Old Khottabych, the character, is the personification of all the odious things that the Soviet propaganda machine sought to eliminate, re-educate, or possibly even sweep under the proverbial rug.  He is old fashioned–he has been in the bottle for a few thousand years and he still thinks the world is flat; he is overly concerned with money and material possessions; and he is not properly “educated.” 

The entire film is devoted to a variety of scenarios involving Old Khottabych trying to do something extravagant for Volka, and Volka saying “no, you can’t do that because it’s improper” or “no, I don’t want a huge palace for myself, give it to the people instead.”  After magically whisking one of Volka’s friends away to India (because Old Khottabych thought he had done something bad to Volka), Volka and Old Khottabych fly away on a magic carpet to rescue the friend because, of course, Volka says it’s the right thing to do.  The three of them run across a palace of sorts with Roman columns and elaborate gardens and it turns out that the people who live there aren’t Sultans (as Old Khottabych expects), but rather regular working miners, laboring for their beloved Russia happily.  There’s even a shot of the miners out doing morning calisthenics together. Happy, well-fed, and working.  The image is clear.

The fun part about this film is how blatant the propaganda is.  Old Khottabych is “Oriental” in the Edward Said sense and it is clear that his “ways” are not the ways of proper Soviet society.  Every time he tries to do something he is corrected by Volka, and eventually Volka and his friend flat-out tell Old Khottabych that he needs to be re-educated. So it’s pretty obvious what’s going on:  replace the Oriental (a.k.a. wrong) with the right (Soviet).  And, the boys’ over-insistence upon having absolutely no “treasures” for themselves (save some ice cream), but rather distributing everything amongst everyone else, is a clear reinforcement of the socialist ideal in direct opposition of the capitalist ideal. 

This film is funny and serious all at the same time.  Certainly it made an impact on those who watched it back in 1956.  I appreciate the craft of weaving the genie tale in with the socialist propaganda.  Might as well make it fun.  And since the focus of the film was how Volka and his other Young Pioneer friends (a “scout-like” organization for children) dealt with this genie’s temptations, I couldn’t help but think of a few other youth organizations: the Hitler Youth, and The Inner Party’s child spies in Orwell’s 1984.  Granted these organizations are different in their basic make-up, but their agendas are similar enough:  to mould proper citizens and/or citizen-soldiers while they’re still young and impressionable.

In this bizarre fantasy from the Czech Republic, an ordinary couple, Karel and Bozena, are unable to conceive a child. When Karel digs up a tree root and whittles something vaguely resembling a human baby, Bozena’s strong maternal longings transform the stump into a living creature … with a monstrous appetite that can’t be met by baby’s formula!

In my rudimentary research into the fairy tale of Otesanek, I could not find whether or not this was a real Czech fairy tale or one that was made up just for this film.  But, as with all good fairy tales, there is always a very dark and sinister side, and it is obvious that the moral of the story is for not only children but also adults.

Otik is the stump-baby that the father, Karel, engenders from a felled tree in the back yard.  Otesanek is the fairy tale equivalent of Otik.  They are essentially one in the same.

When Karel gives Bozena, his wife, the stump-baby, he doesn’t quite understand the extent of her maternal longing until he hands the stump-baby over to her.  She latches onto it immediately and devises an elaborate 8-month-long plan to act as if she is pregnant so she can “give birth” to this stump-baby and bring it into town so they can live as a family and not in hiding–which is ironic because she never lets anyone actually see Otik because, obviously, he is a stump.  When 8 months is up, she mimics labor pains in front of her neighbors so they will not be suspicious and she and Karel go out to their country house to get the baby (which they keep stored in a cupboard).  Karel drops her off and leaves for a few days so that their plan can be as realistic as possible–going to work and telling his coworkers, telling his neighbors, etc.  When he gets back to their country house, Bozena is nursing the baby.  Up until this point, the stump has just been a stump, but now its mouth moves.  But that’s just the beginning.

Turns out little Otik has a taste for more than porridge and mother’s milk:  he craves flesh, and human flesh if he can get his hands on it.  He grows to an astronomical size and eats quite a few people.  The parents eventually lock him in a chest in the basement of their apartment building, but the suspicious little girl next door (Alzbetka), who has been onto their little Otik for a while (she is the one that introduces the viewer to the fairy tale book about Otesanek), befriends the blood-thirsty stump baby and takes care of it when its parents abandon it to (hopefully) die.

Alzbetka is about as precocious a little girl as was ever conceived.  She reads text books about reproduction and other adult-type things, and seems to understand them.  She says many intelligent things that consistently dumbfound her parents.  And she seems to be a step ahead of everybody, especially the building pedophile (an old man with a penchant for staring at her bottom).  She’s a little girl but she’s smart.  In fact, like with all good fairy tales, Alzbetka is the smartest one of the lot.  She has an insider’s view of the situation–she knows how to control Otik like only a child could.  Many of the adults get eaten, but not her.

I could go on and on with the description of this film.  But what I’d like to consider now is what the heck was going on here?  What’s the purpose of this fairy tale/allegory?  We have impotent parents enabling a blood-thirsty stump-baby despite the fact that they know it’s wrong to enable such behavior; we have “out-of-touch” parents raising precocious little Alzbetka, and who don’t listen when she tells them that their old man neighbor is a predator; and we have a society in which people disappear and no one notices–this is a frequent line in the film.  So, it appears that no one pays attention to those around them, and frequently people overlook the obvious moral/ethical-issues that face them and their society.

It appears as though many characters are impotent in this film.  The two parents, Karel and Bozena; the old man pedophile–when Alzbetka imagines he is getting aroused at the sight of her, what comes out of his pants is a hand, not something else, so he must be impotent; Alzbetka’s parents are impotent at raising their own child and feeding her mind with materials appropriate for a girl of her intelligence; and the police don’t seem to do much about all the murders until the last minute, it seems.

Society-and-the-family-as-impotent is a disheartening idea.  Something is going terribly wrong when we allow a monsterous beast to take over our lives and devour those around us because we are too impotent to do anything.  And the fact that Alzbetka takes on the responsibility for Otik’s eating habits is infinitely disturbing–she’s a child and should not be participating in such blood lust, going as far as “drawing straws” to decide who in the building is going to get eaten next.  We have an absolute corruption of morals here.  The girl lures the old man into the monster’s lair with sexual advances, and ultimately to his doom.  She is accomplishing a few goals:  feeding Otik (her plaything, and something she can apparently control), and revenging her dignity. She’s smart.  She’s deliberate.  She doesn’t exhibit the kind of morals we want individuals to have in society.  But she is a direct result of those around her–impotence apparently breeds dysfunction.  That is certainly the case with Otik. 

In the end, the character who saves the day is the old lady caretaker who has been growing and tending to her cabbages for the entire movie.  The only character who has grown anything properly is the only one who can wipe the slate clean with her hoe.  And that’s what she does–according to the fairy tale about Otesanek, it is the farmer that slices open the monster’s belly with her hoe.  Now, the viewer doesn’t see this on screen but it’s obvious that it happens.

But how does the little girl recover from such things as she’s witnessed and done?  Can she be rehabilitated?  The only rehabilitation available to Karel and Bozena is to die as a result of their impotence, same for the old pedophile.  But the little girl is the future and she must be set straight.  She still has parents around her, and the old lady caretaker who perhaps represents moral balance.  But what about little Otik?  Why should he die because no one knew how to raise him?  Well, he was a monstrocity, unnatural, inhuman.  No possibility of rehabilitating a real monster.  But the little girl, she’s worth saving.  We have to try harder next time.  We have to not raise monsters.

In Umberto D, De Sica presents the viewer with a hard-hitting view of life as a retiree in postwar Italy–well, that’s obvious, I suppose.  Umberto was probably in his 70s and he was way past his prime in terms of being able to find employment.  Today, we frequently see retirees working in our communities, filling in the gaps left by their meager Social Security checks.  But, in postwar Italy, they weren’t as “fortunate” as we are today, or we will be in the future. 

What was VERY surprising to me about this film was the way it ended.  Umberto tries desperately to give the love of his life, his dog Flike, to someone who will take care of it.  This is all so that he can feel comfortable, I suppose, in ending his life.  But at every twist and turn, Umberto is unable to give Flike away, or even abandon him to Chance.  It turns out that his love for Flike is a good enough reason to keep on living.

This ending reminds me a lot of the ending of another Italian film, Nights of Cabiria (1957) by Federico Fellini.  Cabiria encounters many hardships before the narrative begins (she is a prostitute so one can imagine the hard life she leads), and certainly throughout the film.  At the end, when the viewer thinks Cabiria isn’t going to be able to go on, we see her emerge from a dark wood (n.b. Dante’s dark wood of error), re-enter the world (the crowd of young people walking down the road singing and playing music), and smile with (possibly) a renewed appreciation for life.  What will happen to Cabiria after that?  Will she go back to prostituting herself, will she ever trust men again, will she do something else?  Fellini is quoted as saying (I believe it is in either Ketcham’s or Bondanella’s text) that he deliberately leaves his film endings open for interpretation because he wants to viewer to make the ultimate decision.  So rather than ending ambiguously, the film ends possibilistically.  Ultimately, the film is for us, the viewers.  It’s a medium for us to absorb and process in our own individual ways.  I don’t know if Cabiria will go back to prostituting, but I know she’ll be happy.  That’s what I get from the film.  She’ll appreciate life.  But this is surprising for the viewer in a way because after all she’s been through, it doesn’t seem like she has much to live for. 

Umberto D also ends in an unexpected way, at least as far as I’m concerned.  The viewer is expecting Umberto to find a place to commit suicide, and he does–an oncoming train.  But a peripetetic moment comes when he’s literally on the threshold of his demise, holding Flike, and when the train comes rushing by, Flike escapes from Umberto’s hands–because HE’S not ready to die.  Then we see a change in Flike–the normally very obedient and affectionate Jack Russell terrier doesn’t want to have anything to do with Umberto because Umberto has not only tried to take his own life, but to take Flike with him.  It takes Umberto a little while to coax Flike back, to get Flike to trust him again.  And the film ends with them friends again, walking away into the park happy and playing together.

This is unexpected because the trajectory of the film is such that the viewer is expecting Umberto to kill himself–he seemingly has nothing to live for: he’s old, he has no money, he has no place to live, he’s treated as an outcast. He’s at the bottom of the food chain and there’s little hope for him in society.  But he defies expectations.  Umberto gives us hope at the end that life isn’t so bad.  Cabiria does the same thing–if she can live through it and be happy, what can we accomplish with our own happiness?  But, alas, it isn’t that easy in the real world, right?  Perhaps only in a neo-realist world can disaster end in a smile.

Umberto D also shines an interesting light on the way we treat the elderly.  Pensions and Social Security just aren’t enough.  We should be doing whatever we can to show our elder citizens (including our own parents and grandparents) the dignity they deserve as they get older and are unable to support themselves.  The maid, Maria, is a great example of a compassionate soul who legitimately cares about the well-being of Umberto–perhaps because she inherently knows about hardship because of her unexpected pregnancy out of wedlock, and the future struggles she will endure as a result.  Maria and Umberto are both in sticky situations–one is too old to work but still very capable of taking care of himself, the other is at a ripe age for working but she has gotten herself into a mess and will soon be fired when the Landlady finds out about her pregnancy.  They both need help: the young and the old.  They both get treated poorly by the landlady, Umberto is overlooked by his former colleagues, and Maria is overlooked by her two lovers.  The viewer doesn’t know what will happen with Maria or Umberto but they will make it because they both show resilience throughout the film, and that is the best indicator of what is to come when you can’t read the future of a finished film.

I suppose what I’ve ultimately taken away from this film is that life itself is the silver lining to the problem of life itself.

I think the most intriguing aspects of the film’s rampant stereotyping was how the inmates and the guards at Guantanamo Bay were presented; how obviously idiotic and highly illogical the Homeland Security Secretary was (played by Rob Corddry from The Daily Show); and how George W. Bush was portrayed as a man who has issues with his father’s (and others’) authority, and how he was just a regular guy who liked a good joke and a good toke. 

What kept me rolling in laughter well after the film had ended was what they all used to describe the “torture” practiced in Guantanamo Bay.  And while the idea of being forced to eat a ”cock-meat sandwich” as your torture is inherently funny (because of the words themselves, not the act itself), it’s also absurdly disturbing.  Do we detain people for our own self-satisfaction?  Is that what Hurwitz and Schlossberg are trying to convey to us? 

And, do we hang on to these stereotypes of ours for our own misguided justifications?  Do we remain in the Dark Ages of our own racism and discrimination so that we can keep discriminating?  This goes for everything presented in the film.  How often do we interpret the world around us incorrectly because of stereotypes we have absorbed into our psyche?  Corddry’s character frequently mistakes individuals based on stereotypes–Harold and Kumar (for terrorists), the African American orthodontist for a Thug, etc.  And, in the case of the Southern stereotypes, how often do “we” overlook that certain things associated with stereotypes might still be going on–we don’t want to believe that Southern people are really inbreeding, but we’re quick to mistake a group of African American males playing basketball in the street for a gang of Thugs. 

How selective are we being with our stereotypes?

Granted, the viewer could see it coming when Kumar pulled out his bomb-like bong in the plane’s bathroom, especially when earlier, the viewer could clearly see the suspicious older white lady eyeing Harold and Kumar in their seats, where she envisions Kumar (an Indian) as a bearded Afghani terrorist.  The viewer knows that they’ll be labeled as terrorists as soon as Kumar pulls that device out of his bag and shows it to Harold.  Reality is unimportant when stereotypes are the currency of fear.

I don’t think this is just another stoner movie.  I think it’s more than that.  From this film, I took away a really long laugh about the “cock-meat sandwich” and the cycloptic inbred baby, and also a better sense of how stereotypes are founded, mis-guided, and mistaken in our own times.  Even down to the rich, young, Republican prick who turned Harold and Kumar into the Feds for his own glory–well, that’s not so much a stereotype as it is a reality, right?!

I’ve known that Abe’s book deals with the same, I suppose psychological, phenomenon of “holes,” and I’ve thought of the novel often, hoping to read it.  But, I decided to watch the film first. The screenplay was written by Abe so perhaps I’m safe in choosing that order. 

What is interesting to me about the film is not necessarily how diabolically the villagers tricked the entomologist, but the cultural reasoning behind keeping the woman down in the dunes.  And, as a second point of interest:  why, ultimately, the entomologist does not leave.

At some point in the film, the woman tells the entomologist about the work that she does and how it helps the village survive.  Well, the work she does is repetitive, tedious, and seemingly un-needed, realistically speaking–because the villagers could just let her out and let the sand cover over her house.  But instead, every night she shovels sand from around her house that has been blown by the wind.  She shovels the sand into buckets and the villagers (who are essentially keeping her prisoner down in the pit so that she will fulfill this utilitarian purpose) hoist up the buckets of sand all night long.  The woman is essentially forced to toil every night at this.  She also does other “woman’s work” in order to earn money.  To add insult to injury, despite the hard work she does every night, she is only given rations of food and water every so often, and not nearly as often as needed.  Needless to say, her life is hard.  And, apparently, without a husband, she gets less from the villagers.

Based on my experience with Japanese fiction, I know that Japan experienced a significant cultural shock when western culture began invading, and that shock is manifested in fiction, film, etc.  I see the woman’s daily shoveling as being indicative of a fear (the villagers’, Japan’s???) of a way of life (the old, non-western way) being overrun by forces (the sand, the west) beyond their control.  Perhaps the novel sheds more light on this, but from what I gathered from the film, the woman was the only person having to do this. It’s unclear as to whether anyone else is having to live such an enslaved, ridiculous life as she.  There were many villagers–they even came around to mock their two captives with a sadistic, sexual taunt–but no other instances of others down shoveling out their holes in the dunes.

What might be happening is that the villagers represent a new way of doing things that requires enslaving or perversely maintaining the old way of doing things (i.e. the woman’s shoveling of the sand).  So while they still live out in the country, and they technically represent the ‘old’ way of life, versus new city life, they almost keep a grossly-exaggerated feudal control over the woman–perhaps this is their last-ditch effort to maintain their cultural identity.  But this reflects very poorly on the villagers if their cultural identity is dependent upon exploiting a poor, innocent woman.  Perhaps this is the message–that it’s a poor reflection on “us” that we have to exploit others so needlessly.

This film is very perplexing to me and I don’t think I’ll be able to answer my second question above (why the entomologist stays) until I can figure out why the woman is even there in the first place.  I suppose I’ll need to get the book.  I’m sure I’ll be updating this posting at some point….

The end of The Machinist reveals all, whereas American Psycho leaves you wondering who the “real” psycho is–Bateman, his Wall Street cadre, or maybe even the viewer.  The viewer feels more fulfilled with the cathartic revelation about the source of Reznik’s year-long insomnia and ultimately his severe weight loss.

Both films delve into self-delusion as a result of psychological trauma or psychotic tendencies.  The director and writer of The Machinist lead the viewer down the same rabbit hole that Trevor is plummeting in order to figure out who the mysterious Ivan character is–someone who no one else can see, but someone who still seems to reak havoc on Reznik’s mind, and even the innocent bystanders around Reznik.

The Machinist is a treatise on self-delusion, the deleterious effects of denial on the psyche, regret, and ethical responsibility.  The ending of The Machinist is reminiscent of Spike Lee’s 25th Hour in that both protagonists show the viewer that they can ‘do the right thing.’ 

While the ending does introduce some narrative inconsistencies when looking back over the the film–the viewer must come to terms with the fact that Reznik hallucinated certain scenes, like at the amusement park–it does not diminish the overall effectiveness of the film’s message.  In fact, it reinforces the main point: that Reznik’s mind was diminishing, along with his body, right in front of the viewer.  And all because of self-denial, self-delusion, and regret–all concepts that each and every viewer can relate to.  A powerful message overall.

Overall, I think the film accomplishes what it sets out to:  to be stupidly funny and ironic.  It pokes fun at celebrity and Hollywood, at high school politics, and at our litigous society. 

And, Mr. M’s ‘Rock Me Sexy Jesus’ musical number is a natural step after Webber’s presentation of the commodification of the Christ.  Though Mr. M doesn’t quite have the lean, swimmer’s body that he purports Jesus would have today.  Perhaps they could’ve brought in Michael Phelps for a cameo.

Overall, it was a fun movie.  And, I tend to agree with Mr. M. that it kinda sucks that Shakespeare’s Hamlet ends so tragically, so having Hamlet time warp back to save everyone shows us that it is possible to have a happy ending in the wake of tragedy.  Perhaps this speaks to our hopes and dreams today….

Herzog’s classic style of filming his subjects (the usually awkwardly long moments of pause) is always appealing.  The way he sets his documentary subjects up for interview and just lets them go on with their stories regardless of how tangential those stories may be, makes for many comical moments throughout the film.  Five or six times the entire theatre quaked with laughter at Herzog’s extra-diegetic commentary about his subjects’ long and drawn out stories.  

Encounters is documenting not only the eccentric individuals at the facility and the scientific research that is going on there, but it is making a relatively overt statement about our (i.e. humankind’s) overuse of the planet. Ultimately, Herzog is, I think, making it pretty obvious that we have outlived our time here and the Earth will right itself, and purge us from our selfish existence.  He comes right out and says it, or rather, some of his subjects say it to the camera.  Herzog provides documentary footage of Shackleton’s exploration of the antarctic ice, and makes what I interpret to be a comment on human exploration in general: that we go to far for the glory.

This brings me to The Wild Blue Yonder because in it, the narrator makes an acerbic comment about those hubristic explorers who dared to defame the world’s mountains (i.e. the trash and corpse heap left on Everest comes to mind).  Thus the two films are linked: lack of respect for our planet’s natural wonders, coupled with the imperial desire to stake claim for our beloved motherlands, is all contributing to our own demise. 

With The Wild Blue Yonder, released two years before Encounters, Herzog used some of the same undersea footage shot by Kaiser and coupled it with NASA footage in order to make a fictional film.  I found a few interesting themes in the film that I’d like to address:  1. the delightfully appropriated science, etc. of Kubrick’s/Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2. MALLS and 3. the extinction of mankind and the Earth re-righting itself without us.

First, in Wild Blue, it was delightful to see the science of the fictional space journey to be at least loosely based on the near-accurate (so I’m told) science that it takes for 2001‘s ship, Leonov, to slingshot past Saturn and into Jupiter’s orbit.  In Wild Blue, Herzog has his ship slingshot around Venus to get to Jupiter.  Anyway, it’s the same idea.  In Wild Blue, the human astronauts find an ice planet (where the earth-bound narrator originally came from) that has primitive live living undersea:  in 2001, Europa, a satellite of Jupiter, is found to have primitive life on it.  And, thirdly, in Wild Blue, in order for the human astronauts to get back to Earth, they go up through an ice portal that de-materializes them into pure light energy:  this is the cipher for the enigma of what happens to Dave Bowman at the end of 2001.  Well, 3 likely connections between the two film texts make for me an interesting find.

Second, in Wild Blue, when the alien-narrator and his people arrived on earth, they decide to set up a city to compete with Washington D.C.  In that city they build a Mall with shops, a Pentagon, a Supreme Court, etc.  They thought for sure the mall would attract people, but it didn’t.  When the humans reach the alien’s icy home planet, they survey it to determine if they can found a civilization.  In true Herzogian humor, one of Herzog’s faux space experts (albeit a REAL mathematician) declares that the best type of civilization that could be founded on alien soil would be one based on Malls and shops.   

What does this say about our imperialistic priorities according to Herzog?  Divide, conquer, build malls? Seems the universe is in sync on that one: if you build a mall, people will come….or not perhaps.  At some point, the human race will be beyond malls…one would hope.

Lastly, when the star-children return home from their seeming 15-year excursion into outer space, the real number of years that have passed is more like 800.  In the interim 800 years, all humanity has disappeared. In our quest for advancement, we’ve managed to (nearly) extinct ourselves (the astronauts-turned-star-children are technically alive to repopulate).  But that’s not the point.  The Earth purged itself of us in 800 years.

This brings to mind a classic SF tale: H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.  In it, the Time Traveller makes it to the year 802,701 (yes, I remember the year exactly!) and while “humanity” hadn’t quite eliminated itself, what remained was a twisted perversion of the master-slave dichotomy:  the Morlocks  & Eloi.  The Time Traveller had assumed humanity would progress to infinite potential in those interim years but, at best, it had retrogressed to a primitive stage unimaginable to the nineteenth-century psyche.  

But like all good fiction, Wells had a point to make: If I can conceive of it, it may happen, so beware of your actions in the present.  There have been many prescient (science) fiction writers from our literary history who have successfully predicted trends in science, politics, etc. (Wells, Huxley, Orwell, Clarke, etc.) I think Herzog is doing the same thing with his two films here:  predicting that perhaps in 800 years, or more or less, our imperialistic-driven, commodification-hungry, super-computer, mega-ton capabilities will mean nothing when the Earth decides to right itself, and write us out of her history.

In The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky’s play on the Jesus Christ Superstar-esque commodification of the image of Christ leads the viewer to a point at which the Thief character has been plaster-copied (enter the simulacra) many times over (the Thief conveniently looks like the standardized image of Christ), and he absconds with one of his copies and subsequently ties it upside down (in an upside down cross image) to a bunch of red balloons and lets it fly away.  This scene reflects, I think, a play on Fellini’s opening scene of La Dolce Vita, where Marcello and Paparazzo are filming the helicopter that is flying the golden statue of Christ over Rome, ultimately to the Vatican and il papa.

The funny thing about the opening of La Dolce Vita is that Marcello and Paparazzo very quickly get distracted away from the flying Christ due to some sunbathing girls ontop of an apartment building.  Bikini-clad girls are a lot more important–at the very least, I think it is Fellini’s way of commenting on modern priorities.  The rest of the film reflects this sentiment, especially the mid-way point’s Children-seeing-the-Madonna spectacle, and the dead and bloated sea monster at the end.

In The Holy Mountain, pretty much immediately, the Thief (i.e. the Christ-like figure) and his image are perverted. And, by the end, Jodorowsky’s very META-cinematic moment reveals what I interpret to be perhaps his true thoughts on religion: let’s live real lives and be happy, and not put stock in false images and unattainable immortality.

Intertwining Christian imagery with Tarot cards and other such eccentricities, Jodorowsky is able to deliver a message to the viewer about the modern world’s obsession with religion, money, sex, image, and war.

Not to mention, the restored version presents Jodorwsky’s vision in bright, vivid colors with very little visual noise.

What I did come away from the film with was, however, a lesson about ethics and the autonomy of the self, especially in relation to our upcoming Presidential election. 

The Joker attempted to remove true ’choice’ from the people multiple times in the film.  Most notably on the two ferries by giving them the choice to either push the button to blow up ‘the other’ boat, or run the risk of having the other boat blow them up.  The dilemma was clear:  be selfish and save yourself, or be riteous and save someone else (or rather, a lot of someones).  Based on the Joker’s instructions, if they didn’t do the deed themselves, he’d intercede with his own detonation device and do it himself.  When the Joker’s deadline comes and goes, and neither boat has blown up the other, it becomes clear that the people on those boats decided on a somewhat silent choice:  to make a true choice for themselves rather than be forced to choose between the seemingly lesser of two evils.  Their choice was to not push the button ‘for’ killing the others, but to make the choice that they would not participate in the mass-killing of other human beings and therefore be blown up themselves.  Collectively, separately, they decided to not be forced into a moral-ethical dilemma, and to take the Joker’s consequences with a clear conscience. To die with a clean conscience is purportedly better than to die with a guilty conscience. 

At the heart of ethics is the treatment of others.  Treating others ethically entails allowing others to make choices and decisions for themselves, as well as not mistreating them.  If an individual is autonomous, he or she has the ability to make choices on his/her own.  That requires that the forces around the individual be conducive to the individual’s ability to make choices.  When ‘others’ act unethically, and attempt to remove one’s ability to choose for him or herself, the autonomy of the self is compromised.

When giving the contrived choice of kill them or yourself (or choose between the lesser of two evils: life or death) the Joker made a profound mistake in judgment.  He assumed the people would seek self-preservation over the moral-ethical ramifications of mass-murder.  He assumed the people would naturally choose to blow up the others: they die, we live.  While both ferries full of people initially struggled with the choices they had been given by the Joker, both eventually came to the same conclusion: that they wouldn’t pull the trigger on the others, no matter who they were or whether they would themselves be ultimately blown up by the Joker. 

It is better to make the choice for yourself than to be forced to pick between contrived choices, come what may.  In that case, the autonomy of the individuals on those two ferries was left intact because they made a choice for themselves, though the Joker attempted to usurp that right from them. (Luckily, Batman detained and overcame the Joker and he wasn’t able to fulfill his end of that wicked deal). 

Earlier in the film, the Joker said that people could deal with chaos and maniacal plots as long as they knew what the chain-of-events and the outcome(s) were; in other words, if they knew the outcome (that was to their own benefit), they’d do whatever it took to make sure it happened.  This scenario is played out relatively well when the Joker notifies everyone that the hospitals would be blown up unless someone murdered the Batman snitch.  The Joker blows up the hospital, as planned.  But in the meantime, it was a race for Bruce Wayne to save the snitch because when ‘forced’ to choose between the snitch and their own loved ones, a few individuals had taken the Joker’s bait (as he predicted).  This sets him up to think he can predict what the people on the ferries will do.

So the Joker was banking on the people on the ferries to do the same thing:  take the bait.  Choose the lesser of two evils: their own lives at the cost of their mortal souls.  The Joker monopolized on his belief that the people would do whatever they were told, no matter how insane, in order to live.

Where this is all going is this: When we, as individuals living in our own world, are ‘forced’ to make the contrived choice between the lesser of two evils, we are being just as unethically treated as the innocent citizens of Gotham were by the Joker.  We typically think of unethical treatment as being torture, racism, sexism, etc. We (read as: the general public) tend to not think of unethical treatment as the literal removal of our ability to choose for ourselves.  Yes, we may have two choices and we may legitimately decide between those two choices, but we have still been ‘given’ those choices and may not necessarily like what’s left over to choose from. 

It’s been this way with all of the Presidential elections I have been old enough to pay attention to.

If I’ve learned anything from The Dark Knight it’s that we shouldn’t be forced to choose between the lesser of two evils.  I acknowledge that to many, our choices now are perhaps a little less ‘evil’ than in times past.  However, like the convict on the ferry, stranded, I too want to toss the detonator out of the window and make a true choice for myself, and not jump on the bandwagon of propaganda and contrived consequences.