Recommend a movie

10 posts

Bronze Age Pervert

I saw The Tree of Life and it's pretentious "artsy" manipulative sentimental crap. Sailer has a pretty good review of it in Taki. The middle scenes are indeed OK, but just OK. One thing Sailer doesn't mention is how humorless and self-consciously "serious" the movie is. Sailer calls it an Episcopalian movie, and I suppose he's right if by that you mean something totally cleaned up and upright, piously mawkish...the movie pretends to show the history of life, but sex and eros is completely absent, and I suppose this is why humor is also absent, and why anything dark is edited beyond recognition. Malick unintentionally shows why Heidegger is inferior to Schopenhauer. The ending is exasperating and I wanted to walk out but my Episcopalian gf would have cried.

O'Zebedee
Secret Honor , Robert Altman's one man movie purportedly about Richard Nixon but actually about John de Nugent.
Ferdinand
Hanzo the Razor trilogy

Hanzo “the Razor” is the protagonist of three films ( Sword of Justice, The Snare, and Who’s got the Gold ) released in the early 1970s. He is a policeman in Edo period Japan and is of the “Dirty Harry” type: he shows no deference to rank or tradition, instead he seeks what he considers to be justice for “the people”. He lives in a house, replete with booby-traps, with his two ex-con assistants, who provide the films’ comic element through their effete natures and bungling. An ascetic dedicated to his work, he subjects himself to various tortures in order to learn the limits of man’s endurance and as self-purification. Hanzo is also endowed with an abnormally large phallus, to which special attention is paid in his training regime. As per the genre, Hanzo consistently collides with his corrupt, avaricious chief, whom he calls snake, and the elite political and religious factions of Edo.

Aesthetically the films are unremarkable. The action is violent, with the traditional geysers of blood, but it is of a limited scale and its choreography is competent but little more. What makes the films stand out is the nature of the sexual violence: Hanzo deploys his priapic excess to the ends of justice by raping women in order to extract confessions. The films do not hold back in showing that the women enjoy this - affirming the idea that they are uncivilised power-worshipers - and as such always provide Hanzo with the information he needs. Post-interrogation, they often lovingly share a bath with him! The most jarring and incongruous element of the films is the music. This is a sort of jazz funk, which might sit well in Blaxploitation but is most odd in a period Japanese piece.

As to quality, the second film is the best followed by the third. The first film does introduce the major characters, but is annoyingly incoherent and also has the most intrusive soundtrack. This said, all the films follow a very simple formula (making plot exposition here, frankly, unnecessary) and none stands out as a genuine great. They are remarkable only for historical interest: firstly, to show the influence of American culture on Japan and how they incorporated it, and secondly for the non-PC sexual violence.
O'Zebedee

Looking for it on torrents now.

O'Zebedee
Ix
Dan Dare

For my maiden innings I am going to commend a documentary (actually several) by filmmaker Marc Isaacs (yeah, yeah, I know) that have been released on two DVDs by Second Run in the UK. Cheapskates and video pirates will no doubt be able to find them online in all the usual places.
Three Films by Marc Isaacs: Lift, Travellers, Calais:The Last Border
Two Films by Marc Isaacs: All White in Barking, Men of the City
Of the first three, the last one, made in 2003 is probably the most interesting, which is not to say that the others are not also worth seeking out and watching. Calais: The Last Border was entirely shot in the French Channel port at a time when the Sangatte ‘refugee’ centre was still in full operation, and provided a base for the hundreds of would-be migrants who each night descended on the ferry and Channel Tunnel Shuttle terminals in the hope of making their way to England. Isaacs infiltrated himself into this milieu and manages to capture the sense of hope and desperation that these poor wretches cling to in their quest to reach the ‘Promised Land’.
The second DVD is generally more even in quality and interest level. The first programme All White in Barking was commissioned by the BBC for its controversial (notorious?) series White ., and Niccolo will be interested to learn that it won the coveted Audience Prize at the Zagreb Film Festival in 2008. As the title implies, the film is based in the town of Barking at around the time that the BNP was approaching its time of maximum political penetration. One of the main characters is an elderly BNP activist who is in the process of moving away to somewhere ‘whiter’ and, nt unsurprisingly is not portrayed in a particularly sympathetic light. Isaacs does take some effort to show the effects that the demographic transformation is having on the town – the ‘English’ butcher driven out of business by competition from the halal establishment a few doors down, the nice elderly couple putting a brave face on being flanked by new neighbours, Albanian on one side, West African on the other – but generally the tone is detached and neutral. One of the most interesting themes involves Monty, an elderly Holocaust survivor (evidently one of Martin Gilbert’s Boys ) who has fetched up with a live-in African ‘helper’ many years his junior. Monty has her accompany him to a reunion of the ‘Boys’ in which a variety of North London fellow Landsmänner are present, including a formidable group of blue-rinsed Jewish matrons. Their gasps of shock and pained expressions at the sight Monty’s new companion are both palpable and completely undisguised, and this alone is worth the price of admission.
Men of the City takes place in the City of London on the cusp of, and some way into the financial meltdown, cataloguing its effect s on a varied cast of characters, including a wealthy broker, a Bangladeshi sandwich-board wallah, an English street cleaner and a soon-to-be unemployed jobbing clear at Lloyd’s. Very entertaining and also most instructive. Sic transit gloria!

Dr. Heywood R. Floyd
I do not agree with your characterization of "...And Justice for All" as a "weak movie." Its near-classic 1970s cinema.
Cornelio

The Indian Runner (1991)

:thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

I think it's a good movie.

O'Zebedee

I've been watching William Friedkin's remake of The Wages of Fear, called Sorcerer . I think it got a bad rap when released; it's very enjoyable.