Recommend a movie

The best Jarmusch is him fishing with John Lurie in Fishing With John .

Of the films I have seen in the last couple of years, I recommend the following:

Earth
by Dovzhenko

Angel's Egg

El Topo
by Jodorowsky

Persona
by Bergman

Alice
by Švankmajer

Archangel
by Guy Maddin

Sunrise
by F.W. Murnau

Der Golem
by Carl Boese

Marebito
by Takashi Shimizu

Taxi Driver
by Scorsese

Tetsuo, the Iron Man
by Tsukamoto

Jabberwocky
by Švankmajer

Dark Water
by Nakata

Careful
by Guy Maddin

The Blood of a Poet
by Jean Cocteau

Ju-on: The Grudge
by Takashi Shimizu

House
by Nobuhiko Obayashi

Faust
by Švankmajer

Eyes Without a Face
by Georges Franju

The Innocents
by Jack Clayton

Vampyr
Carl Theodor Dreyer

Ring
by Hideo Nakata

Midori

Beauty and the Beast
by Jean Cocteau

I saw The Machinist . BAP wasn't kidding when he mentioned that it owed to Dostoevsky and Kafka. The main character is shown reading The Idiot ; there is a shot of The Castle lying in his cabinet; a movie marquee reads Crime and Punishment . It's all a bit on-the-nose. The washed-out palette and sparse sound lent the movie an alienating atmosphere, appropriate considering the director's influences; the tinting reminded me of Michael Mann or Soderbergh (there's a bluish-grey haze over much of the film). The visuals are the movie's most appealing aspect, although the performances are also decent, especially the emaciated Bale, who brims with nervous energy. The plot is by-the-numbers psychological thriller fare: paranoia turns to delusion, delusion is revealed as an aftereffect of trauma (in this case, a hit-and-run involving a child). There are imaginary characters, there are red herrings to trick you into thinking that the delusion is perhaps reality, there's a scene which is intended as a metaphor for the psyche (the haunted ride), etc. It's nothing you haven't seen before. Still, it's worth a look. I'd give it 3 out of 5.

Today I saw Cronenberg's Shivers (1975)

A mad scientist, believing that man has lost touch with his natural instincts, develops a venereal disease which transforms its victims into mindless sex-zombies. Sexual liberation becomes an unmitigated horror as every sexual taboo is broken -- incest, promiscuity, homosexuality, etc. Although the film is marred by sexual nudity, profanity, mediocre acting, and amateurish workmanship, yet it is sufficiently unsettling to hold one's attention and is not without moments of genuine intensity. I give it a 6 out of 10.

My favourite line from the film:

"I found myself making love to a strange man. Only I'm having trouble because he's old and dying and he smells bad and I find him repulsive. But then he tells me that everything is erotic, that everything is sexual.... He tells me that even old flesh is erotic flesh, a disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other, that even dying is an act of eroticism, that talking is sexual, that breathing is sexual, and even to physically exist is sexual."

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/PB1dVwspeCc

Yesterday I watched El espíritu de la colmena ("The Spirit of the Beehive"). Set in a remote Spanish village in the early 1940s, the story focuses on the life of a young girl who is mesmerised by James Whale's cinematic adaption of Frankenstein (1931). The experience works so deeply on her imagination that she fancies the monster to be a spirit that haunts the woods and can be summoned at will. The progress of the story is advanced not so much by action and dialogue but by the strange poetic force of its images, which paint a remarkably vivid picture of childhood fears and fantasies. Although I found the film to be pleasant in its calm atmospheric build-up, if you expect a story to place stress on the mere events of the plot, you will probably have little patience for this film. As an authentic picture of the emotional life of a child -- without the usual sentimentalism -- it is unsurprassed by any film I've seen. I give it a 10 out of 10.

I'm not recommending it, but the film had Salotrean themes so I thought I'd mention it here.

I saw Immortals last night in 3D (OMG!) I went in not knowing what it was about and was initially excited by the beginning of the story, which featured Mickey Rourke, solid, thick, and tight, as king Hyperion of the Heracleidae, leading the late-bronze age invasion of Greece that (according to some) ushered in the Greek dark ages. Opposing the Dorians is Theseus who, in this narrative, is a shunned peasant boy whom Zeus trains to be a warrior. Since Americans find the aristocratic ethos of Greece unpalatable, Theseus is transformed into an egalitarian British faggot who opposes the austere, hierarchical rule of the "Helladic" or Mycenaean civilization that he ultimately defends against the invasion. Hyperion, in contrast, is a towering, war-mongering barbarian from the north whose primary goal is to destroy the Gods of the Greeks and spread his seed across the world so that his genes live on forever.

Despite having an exciting historical premise, the plot and action are boring. The film seems to promote the mythical and theological elements of Greece against the liberal and rationalist tendencies that were promoted in 300 , portraying the native, Helladic Greeks (apart from Theseus and his comrades) as effete philosophers, atheists, and bureaucrats who shun the Gods. (At one point the film shows the weakness of the latter tradition by having Hyperion decapitate a Greek who entreats the Heracleidae to deliberate and "negotiate" in the Greek political tradition.) But there really isn't any overt political purpose to the film.

What was really infuriating about this film, apart from the cartoonish nerd aesthetic, which seems to be a necessary component of every historical film not made by Mel Gibson, was the oscillation between strangely precise historical references and subversive liberal interjections. On the one hand the film goes out of its way to be historically accurate and use the Linear B script of the Mycenaeans, but on the other it has multicultural sibylline oracles baking in a brazen bull. The film would also lead one to believe that sub-Saharan Africans were not only prominent members of Mycenaean civilization, but also managed to migrate north of Greece and assimilate into the barbaric Doric civilization.