Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, 2013)
Five shots in quick succession; montage at its most potent.
Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, 2013)
Five shots in quick succession; montage at its most potent.
Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1972)
Beer as fuel for masculinity, mischief, misogyny and madness in the Australian outback
The Unspeakable Act (Dan Sallitt, 2013)
In The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Trouble in Mind (Alan Rudolph, 1985)
Red and Green as shifting signifiers in a movie where all roles are fluid (good guys are bad guys / drag queens are gangsters)
Butterflies Have No Memories (Lav Diaz, 2009)
A collision between new world and old when a young expatriate returns to the decaying Philippine village where she was raised. Coming from Canada with some nice clothes and a fancy camera, the unnamed girl uses her trip as an excuse to indulge in exoticism and nostalgia, snapping pictures of old locations, old friends, and the ruins of the local mine, which ceased production when her bossman father decamped for greener pastures. Things are a little trickier, however, for the dejected villagers she’s employing in this living history memorial, thanks both to the economic collapse caused by the mine’s departure and the river-ruining toxins it left behind. Diaz communicates the sodden, defeated pace of life here through long takes and grey-tinged images, with the primary tension revolving around the girl’s self-involved inability to perceive how uncomfortable her presence is making everyone else. When things finally erupt into violence, Diaz masks his assailants as Roman soldiers (a Filipino tradition), a nice detail that places this conflict within a long tradition of imperialist struggles while highlighting the way the oppressed vainly attempt to empower themselves through violence.
Live and Let Die (Guy Hamilton, 1973)
This one is icky even by Bond standards, with the faltering franchise in such a rush to appropriate hip signifiers (Bond’s Bullitt turtleneck/shoulder holster and Dirty Harry magnum, his new habit of drinking bourbon straight, etc.) that no one seemed to realize the message sent by having an island dictator, a Harlem drug dealer and a black restaurant proprietor all turn out to be the same person. There’s also a sacrificial voodoo scene with the virginal heroine costumed to look like Fay Wray in the sacrifice from King Kong (seriously). But the whole thing is so monumentally silly that it’s hard to get too worked up about it, and seeing how hard the series was hitting the skids in its first real decline (the low budget is noticeable) the film perversely earns its kinship with the low-rent blaxpoitation flicks it was trying to emulate, even if it is a perfect embodiment of the Cinema of The Man. Another story of fusty British values fighting against the tide of a changing world, it expresses a mix of awe and confusion at the culture of black America, while desperately struggling for modern relevance alongside it, making a clown out of a racist Southern sheriff, even as it vaunts the exploits of a hero who’s just as regressive.
All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)
More movies should end with Ben Vereen anchored, Simon and Garfunkel scored, stage spectacular versions of This is Your Life.
Porfirio (Alejandro Landes, 2013)
Like the limbless husk of a man in Wakamatsu’s Caterpillar, Porfirio is both a nasty blob of infantile Id and a scarred totem of a violent past, left crippled after being shot in the back by a police officer. The exact circumstances of this shooting are never revealed, which seems intentional, since it allows him to serve a dual purpose on a symbolic level, standing in either for the hyper-masculine legacy of a nation plagued by a history of blood feuds (grenades as shiny new testicles), or the frustrations of the same country’s long-suffering populace, stymied in a static space while the world rushes by outside. Beyond these symbolic assignments he’s further presented, in a series of visceral scenarios highlighting the gross outlines of his body, as a person, but also kind of a shitty one, a bifurcated portrayal that allows us to judge the man’s faults (carelessly knocking over a flowerpot and then grinding the pieces into the ground) while feeling pity for him at the same time.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Peter Yates, 1973)
Yates makes sharp use of the rough outlines of the Robert Mitchum persona the same way he did for Steve McQueen’s insouciant cool, plunking the camera down in view of his eminent hangdog-weariness to immediately convey the exhaustion of his main character, which continues through an out-of-touch, overlong monologue about broken fingers. This is a man whose time has passed (“I could never understand why a man would want to use a machine gun”) but is impelled by sheer force of habit to continue in this game. Of course, the trick is that the game is rigged, so qualities like carefulness (embodied by the paranoid Jackie Brown, adverse to risk aside from his hideous green-yellow car) or honesty (Eddie’s quickly fading good intentions) will get you nowhere. The ‘no honor among thieves’ maxim is an old one, but it’s interpreted with quiet steadiness here, and the result is pretty heartbreaking; the system only let Bullitt down, but it crushes Eddie, putting him out to pasture in the shallow grave of a suburban parking lot.
Moi, Un Noir (Jean Rouch, 1958)
Not as dizzyingly liberating as the documentary-by-committee approach of Chronicle of a Summer, Rouch’s film is still both seminal and singular, helping to establish the modern documentary template while simultaneously exploring its shortcomings, allowing his cast of expatriate Nigeriens to narrate a fictionalized docudrama depiction of their lives as immigrants in Cote d’Ivoire. It’s a hands-on approach that distorts the footage and serves as a direct rejoinder to their cinema inspired nicknames (Tarzan / Edward G. Robinson), while showing an Africa which, still marred by post-colonialist scars, is as divided by class structure as contemporary France.
Jonah Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000 (Alain Tanner, 1976)
Another great, sufficiently draining post ‘68 comedown movie; imagine The Mother and the Whore as an autumnal ensemble comedy with more quiet despair and uglier actors. Stripped of their optimism but still trying to maintain their politics, the thirty-somethings here fret about the future amid a symbol-heavy thicket of meat, produce and earth tones (something is definitely going on here with the color orange), visual icons that crop up in equal proportion in the didactic dialogue. There’s a stilted heavy-handedness to the way the characters speak about each other and themselves, but this quality seems less like a fault than the natural consequence of characters who are too self-aware, with too much time banked obsessing over their mistakes, spinning personal mythologies around them, responding to failure by constructing equally limiting prisons of self-classification. I will most likely remember the ‘time is a sausage’ scene every time I pull a sausage out of my briefcase.
Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, 2012)
Masterfully compartmentalizes its giallo-fixations (the leather-gloved Moltar hand operating behind the scenes is a great little touch), its visceral horror teases (the same goes for all that crushed fruit) and its period setting as closed-off units in a larger story of spiritual corrosion, never giving any of those elements the chance to draw away the film’s focus. Stocked with distancing gestures, foremost of these being the stifling toll of a movie taking place almost entirely indoors and at night, the setting here ends up as a great visual analogue for the main character’s distressed mind, with the small-man-finds-his-big-voice storyline getting inverted, instead depicting a reticent loser learning to vent his inner monster.
