Recommend a movie

Better than Idi Amin Dada is Africa Addio. Best bixnood documentary, made by Italians who don't care. The most accurate account of African decolonization which exists on film.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/NHnF85dww3M

This was recommended to me by Kevin DeAnna the one time I was in the same room with the guy. I kind of wish I had picked his brain on more such films.

I saw American Sniper. Eastwood's flat, boring style works to the advantage of the narrative in this case by bolstering the film's realism and highlighting the psychological effects of warfare on American soldiers. The film rotates between Kyle's four tours and the intervening time he spends stateside without using transitions. In one scene he's fighting and watching turrists drill holes in children and in the next he's at the auto repair shop getting triggered by the sound of the mechanic's tools. This is an effective and probably more accurate depiction of how "triggers" work than most people are used to.

There seems to be something wrong with America's soldier class or the way America conducts wars and trains soldiers. It's possible that the Saturday morning cartoon Christian morality of rural Scots-Irish, which Eastwood highlights as the source of Kyle's determination and strength, is simply incapable of providing soldiers with long-term psychological stability. The story depicts Kyle struggling with the barbarism of the turrists and his inability to save weaker soldiers from injury and death. It's also possible that the coddled comfort and inanity of day-to-day American life cannot serve as a baseline norm for a soldier class - there's another scene in the film where his wife's OBGYN takes his blood pressure and reveals that Kyle is hypervigilant and in fight-or-flight mode during his wife's routine pregnancy check-up.

Something else that struck me is that the dramatized Vasily Zaytzev sniper duel between Kyle and the Syrian sniper doesn't make Kyle admirable. It's hard to revere a "hero" that is depicted as having aerial drone surveillance support, night vision goggles, infrared range-finding sights, a full team of Navy SEALs, and a satellite phone (through which he can have phone sex with his wife while he's in a war zone) during battle. In fact, I came away from the film admiring how effective a lone-wolf Syrian sniper with a tracksuit and Soviet SVD could be. American techno-warfare makes heroism increasingly elusive for the west because it prevents us from attributing our military successes to individual skill, discipline, and courage.

Over the past few months I’ve re-watched the following lowbrow films:

* Deep Blue Sea (1999) - This is an underrated film, which I recommend - with certain reservations - especially on Blu-Ray. I remember watching this repeatedly when it first came out. The underwater sets are futuristic-seeming and arguably a great Work of Art. The film has its great "moments", but also very great passages: the way that the underwater facilities slowly flood and collapse would be the highlight. Unfortunately, the film as a whole itself falls apart by implausibility and the particular moments of obviously CGI sharks that ruin the entire effect. The trailer is arguably much better than the film.

* Alien (1979) and its sequel, Aliens (1986) - no need to comment on this since everybody’s seen it. The second is a perfected member of the action film genre, that is a more perfect member of an inherently inferior genus than Ridley Scott's original.

* The Abyss (1989) - the best underwater film overall, although falling squarely into the formulaic action flick category.

* Prometheus (2012) - I will have more to say about this later.

* The Reef (2010).

* Cube (1997) - one of the best films ever, a masterpiece. Here is a review of it, and the trailer . Also see Cube 2: Hypercube.

* What is absolutely needed, but does not yet exist, is a film version of Sleator's House of Stairs .

[Edit: Some edits to what I’ve written]

More seriously, this is how I would, provisionally, classify films (from bad to good):

* Low combinations that make you stupid after watching it: pretty much the typical blockbuster, e.g. 'Lord of the Rings'. Any kind of formulaic plot that dissolves into a combination of simple components. And biopics are, as I have established and parodied, purely formulaic in conception and execution.

* Simple combinations, but that are pretentious and lack the complexity and scale of literature: Kubrick, the symbolic part of Ingmar Bergman, and the rest of allegedly 'high-brow' films. What could be more hollow, silly and banal than someone like Kubrick’s pretensions to being a 'genius'? Film of this sort runs in simple combinations of ideas. There is first of all no technical dimension to it, by which the alteration of a single part would change the entire effect. (Hence the inferiority to painting, poetry and architecture.) There is no architectural thinking or an attempt to keep a perpetual eye upon some big picture. There is a lack of the complexity and scale of the novel format. Etc. This is obvious when you compare some 'high of the highbrow' director like Kubrick, with someone like Stanislaw Lem: the inferiority of the former is so utterly crushing and final, that he seems decidedly to be part of an inferior species.

* 'Action' or suspense films that also run in low combinations of imagery, with a bit of fine-tuning to adjust the pacing: anything by James Cameron, Spielberg, and their like. The most highly evolved version of this is the 'art of visual succession’, see below.

* World-building and universe-building films: Blade Runner, A.I. (which however does so only in a few good 'moments'), Prometheus, Minority Report. (Here, the greatest heights seem to only be reached by novels: those of Jack Vance, Phillip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem. But the films - particularly the recent 'Prometheus' - also have qualities only available to cinema.) The inferior version of this is doubtless the Hollywood epic such as 'Ben Hur' or 'Lawrence of Arabia'. 'Gladiator' (also by Ridley Scott) I find very formulaic.

* Films whose significance is mostly decorative, and that covers both visual and social ambience. On the visual category, the entire genre of Noir films would fit right in. In the area of social ambience, there is the kind of film that depict the niceties of human manners in the upper-middle class: 'Grand Hotel', Garbo films in general, Cameron’s 'Titanic' (at least the first part), the far, far superior Titanic film 'A Night to Remember' by Roy Wood Baker, Scorsese's 'The Age of Innocence’.

The highest version of the purely decorative art is: films in which cinematography forces a visual journey: Jean-Pierre Jeunet is an example here, and there is Sven Nykvist (cinematographer for Bergman). Plus there are a few surprisingly good Far Eastern films: 'Shanghai Triad', and 'Zhou Yu’s Train' have powerful cinematography.

* The 'art of visual succession' or the exact movement of the camera and sequence of angles that produce an effect. Ingmar Bergman was the best at doing this to convey emotional tension between characters, and other great ones would include: Fellini, Rossellini, Visconti, Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Dreyer (Vampyr), Clayton (The Innocents). But this is arguably really a manual skill, based on fine tuning just as with action sequences.

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After this point, one goes beyond simple combinations and manual skill, and into the sometimes inspired:

* Entertainment by satire and literary witticism: Woody Allen’s films (particularly 'Manhattan' and 'Annie Hall'), 'The Truman Show' by Weir, and 'Natural Born Killers' by Oliver Stone (the rest of his output is, however, mentally feeble and infantile propaganda). The few counterparts of this in the graphic novel (i.e. comic book) format would include 'Transmetropolitan' and 'Planetary' by Warren Ellis (who also a novelist). But even here, the heights are only reached in the format of printed plays and novels, and especially by Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Terry Pratchett, etc.)

* Entertainment by brilliant and intense combinations of imagery: David Lynch, Darren Aronofsky. Also the recent 'Ink' by Winans. There is really no counterpart to this in any other format other than film. There is no counterpart in any other medium of art to 'Mulholland Drive' or 'Eraserhead'.

* Visual montage, which adds an entirely new dimension to film. There are regular cuts between different unfolding events or different phenomena, forcing a kind of visual polyphony. Soviet film is characterized by this: Tarkovsky, Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, Pudovkin, Vertov, Paradjanov, Chukhray (Ballad of a Soldier), Kalatozov (Letter Never Sent; I Am Cuba; The Cranes are Flying), Barnet (Outskirts; By the Bluest of Seas). Also: Riefenstahl, Murnau (Nosferatu; Faust), Wegener (The Golem), Wiene (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), and many others. The conventional version of this would be the last hour of Cameron's 'Titanic', which is moderately effective in balancing different things at once, but lacks anything really striking.

I am surprised, Thoughts, that you saw anything in Prometheus. The "world construction" was directly stolen from the classic 1958 BBC mini-series, "Quatermass and the Pit" (mentioned above) -and the pacing, plot and characterization was vastly superior in the BBC original. The rest of it was galloping sequelism, designed to appeal to fanboys who just had to have some ridiculous autistoid explanation for the eerie/cool/mysterious sets which were presented 34 years prior in the movie Alien.

Otherwise, I think Ridley Scott was pretty good before he became fat and complacent.

In the mindless action category, Charles Bronson is little appreciated now a days. Bronson was the main action hero before steroids were introduced to the genre. Deathwish, of course, is a perfect reaction to the evils of the 1970s. A decent buddy movie with some period flare is his movie "Hard Times." A weird almost spiritual one, "The White Buffalo," with a great cameo from Slim Pickens, who is one of my favorite character actors. Probably his best movie (and most unfairly forgotten) was "The Mechanic" where he plays a hired assassin. I think they remade this with modern sitzpinkler actors. Bronson is not a good actor. Like Eastwood, he pretty much always plays himself: a laconic tough guy. I think, though, that Bronson had a more intense and to a certain extent admirable character. He didn't seem to give two shits for fame; it was just a weird and somewhat demeaning job for him.

one of my fav films of all time, watch it.