#i like the plot but the permeating sense of doom make me sad

[bellaroles]

Jinyiwei might just be the saddest FTYX's work I've ever read. Still haven't read the twin jade of Jiangdong though, but this is just so sad on many levels.

[nitrateglow]

What are some movies you consider to be underrated?

There are sooooo many; I’m sad I only have time to list a few here. I think everyone who’s ever been on my blog, knows ofmy admiration for underrated work like Blast of Silence, The Old Dark House,The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Ball of Fire, The Black Cat, Horus Prince of theSun, Eyes Wide Shut, Battling Butler, and O Lucky Man! There are actually so many movies I find underrated, butI don’t want to bore everybody by detailing each one. So here are a few otherswhich I haven’t detailed as much, but they are underrated indeed:

Donkey Skin (dir. Jacques Demy, 1970)

Really all of Jacques Demy’s movies should be listed, but I’lljust settle for my favorite of his work, this borderline surreal musicaladaptation of Donkey Skin. If you haven’t heard of the original fairy tale,then the plot is basically about a princess whose father wants to marry her.Disguising her beauty with the skin of a donkey, she goes into hiding where hemeets a handsome prince and, well, you can figure the rest. This movie isunique in how it both adheres to and subverts fairy tale tropes. Unlike several18th and 19th century renditions of classic stories, theprincess here is given more agency in determining her fate and going after whatshe wants. The movie also includes uncomfortable musings about taboo desires,but most people don’t notice them right off the bat. The film also pays a lotof homage to Jean Cocteau’s 1946 classic Beauty and the Beast, from certainscenes to the casting of Jean Marais (who played the Beast in the older movie)as the incestuous king, so you may want to see that movie first, though it isn’tnecessary to enjoying Donkey Skin.

The Most Dangerous Game (dir. Pichel and Schoedsack, 1932)

I really dig this movie, which is a well-paced andatmospheric horror film from the genre’s first golden age in American cinema. Itstill reigns as the best adaptation of the short story, even as it expands uponit by adding sexual subtext into the mix. The giant jungle set gives the moviea claustrophobic, trapped feel, adding to the predicament of the maincharacters. It does have moments of camp, but that doesn’t stop the morechilling and thrilling moments from working. This is a movie I’ve seen so muchI memorized it beat for beat and I actually prefer it to the more epic KingKong, though that is also a damned good movie.

Young Mr. Lincoln (dir. John Ford, 1939)

My favorite John Ford movie. It follows a young Abraham Lincoln,back when he was a lawyer, dealing with a murder case. Because this takes placelong before Lincoln was involved in politics, he is not presented as thedemigod other movies tended to make him out to be; instead, we get a young manshowing signs of greatness, but also racked with moments of uncertainty anddoubt. While I often speak of great movies which shock and confront theaudience with their subject matter, Young Mr. Lincoln is a gentler movie,infused with low-key humor and humanistic compassion. No one really talks aboutthis one, I guess because it’s a non-Western Ford film, and that is a shame.

Scaramouche (dir. Rex Ingram, 1923)

Yeah drag me to the guillotine, but I much prefer this movieto the more famous 1952 talkie remake. It’s a great French Revolution eraadventure story about a lawyer who wants to avenge his best friend’s death atthe hands of a nobleman. Great fight scenes that feel like actual fights(unpopular opinion: I don’t care for the really long swordfight at the end ofthe remake; its over-choreographed nature felt like compensation for the movienot sporting that good of a hero/villain dynamic… kind of like Revenge of theSith’s ridiculous final battle), lots of epic sweep and spectacle! It’s not thedeepest movie in the world, but it has good characters and a story that keepsyou entertained all the way through.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (dir. Billy Wilder,1970)

This movie examines the mythos of Sherlock Holmes and theVictorian era with an almost elegiac gaze. It mixes dark and dry humor withmelancholy, though it is ultimately a great, if episodic, Holmes mystery.  When most people talk about this movie, whenthey talk about it at all, it’s because there is a scene where Holmes pretendshe and Watson are a couple in order to throw off the sexual advances of a primaballerina. When Watson later asks if Holmes is gay, he gets an ambiguous answerand the Watson/Sherlock shippers go insane as a result. This scene actuallydoes get to the heart of the film: it asks how much do we really know aboutHolmes as a man and why does he keep himself so detached from others? Like mostgreat movies, the film never gives you a definite answer and invites you tobring your own conclusions.

Marie Antoinette (dir. Sofia Coppola, 2006)

A movie people tend to love or hate (much like all of Sofia Coppola’s movies). I obviously like it alot. It’s a character study of the doomed queen, particularly her alienation asa foreign consort at Versailles. The film is more about what happens inside thecourt than the revolution brewing outside it, though its threat is felt keenlytoward the end of the movie. There are several intentional anachronisms meantto highlight Marie Antoinette’s youth at the time of her ascension to thethrone, to make modern audiences understand she was still a child in many ways; the soundtrack is permeated with 1980s music, linking the decadence ofthe French aristocracy and royalty with the prosperity of 1980s America.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. Jiri Trnka, 1959)

A stop-motion version of the Shakespeare play. It does makesome changes to the text, particularly to the Mechanicals, but I think theyactually add a sense of melancholy and reflection of the nature of art thatwasn’t in the original play. It’s my favorite movie version of the story and Iwould recommend it even to people who didn’t care for the source material. It’salso gorgeous to look at, a masterpiece of the stop-motion form.

Blood for Dracula (dir. Paul Morrisey, 1974)

A great 1970s cult hit. Set in 1920, Dracula is starvingbecause he finds it harder and harder to find virgins to feast on in the modernworld. He preys upon an aristocratic Italian family, assuming the marriageable daughtersare virginal. Boy is he in for a surprise! Also he has to contend with a hunkyCommunist handy man. This movie is incredibly goofy and gory, though it doesalso have some poignant moments that make you feel sorry for Dracula.

Dracula (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)

A LOT of people hate this movie and I won’t say I don’t getwhy. There is a lot of dumb stuff in it and it comes off as overindulgent attimes. Yet despite these flaws, I admire the movie’s ambition and what it doesget right. Gary Oldman is perfect as a sad yet ferocious vampire who defies Godto reunite with the woman he loved. The visuals are pure gothic, absolutelygorgeous. And I love how the movie is in some ways an homage to the earlycinema of George Melies and the Lumiere Brothers. There’s even a scene wherethey used an old turn of the century camera to film a crowd scene! That is socool!

[vod19]

Day 59. “Attenberg” (2010), dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari

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My main cinematic revelation of the past 19 days is that the family lunch scene in Wedding Crashers (2005) — with Christopher Walken as the head of the family — is potentially a quote from the family lunch scene in Annie Hall (1977) —with Christopher Walken as the mentally unstable brother. (“I can’t believe this family. Annie’s mother is really beautiful... And they're talkin' swap meets and boat basins. The old lady at the end of the table is a classic Jew-hater. They’re really American, really healthy, like they never get sick or anything”.) My other cinematic revelation is Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg, which is very good. 

***

Marina (Ariane Labed) does not find fellow humans as interesting as the animal world presented in Sir David Attenborough’s programmes. She tells her only friend, Bella (Evangelia Randou) about Attenborough, whom Bella mistakingly calls “Attenberg”. Athina Tsangari’s Attenberg is an eerie drama that combines plot elements of tragedy (the protagonist is taking care of her dying father, played by Vangelis Mourikis) with those of absurdism (the protagonist is trying to make sense of her body’s relation to the outside world, which does not come naturally to her).

Historically, the label of the absurd is ascribed to various literary works, from those of Kierkegaard and Camus to the collection of utterly different plays that constitute ‘the Theatre of the Absurd’, i.e. dramaturgy of Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov and others. Several films of what has been coined as ‘the Greek Weird Wave’ borrow elements of the theatre of the absurd, yet present them in a semi-realistic form of well-paced and traditionally edited sequences. Tsangari’s camera is largely static or at least unobtrusive, producing equally coldly detached representations of cosy interiors of Spyros’ and Marina’s home and the sterile spaciousness of the hospital in which Spyros’ receives treatments. (Yorgos Lanthimos plays the role of Marina’s love interest in Attenberg, which was released a year after Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, and the connection between the two — their matter-of-factly way of portraying oddly mechanistic relationships — can hardly be left unnoticed.)

It may seem that Marina’s unapologetic repulsion by actions that mostly come naturally to people — such as kissing or having sex — evokes the sense of discomfort and oddity in its viewer (aka me). However, I would argue that it is not merely the actions or emotions of the protagonist that appear strange, but the detached style of narration that produces a sense of unavoidable eeriness, permeating every space in Tsangari’s film. Unlike Roman Polanski’s psychological horror Repulsion (1965) — it depicts a woman (Catherine Deneuve) repulsed by the omnipresence of eroticism — which creates a sense of doom and horrific disorientation by means of form, Attenberg maintains straightforward cinematography and non-experimental editing. Instead of generating a diegetic world, she looks at that world with stranger’s eyes, unbiasedness of which only emphasises the mismatch between Marina and the world she inhabits.

More than that — this mode of narration results in the avoidance of manipulation of the viewer’s emotions, even when one is presented with the tender relationship between Marina and her dying father. Or, rather, it results in manipulation of the viewer to watch emotionlessly. This choice is reinforced by the script. While it is apparent that Spyros is terminally ill, the father and daughter continue to  casually play word games, where each of them has to say a word that rhymes with the previous one and eventually resort to nonsense and animal sounds. They also have conversations about sexuality, which undermine the seemingly stable notions of morality and social conventions — especially when Spyros explains to Marina that incest is bad because it will result in an unhealthy offspring (and not because it is simply wrong).

I am struggling to make up my mind as to whether Attenberg is utterly cynical [the world is as it is, your father will die and you will disperse his ashes over the sea, and there is nothing natural or unnatural as long as the offspring is healthy] or incredibly tender [the world is as it is, but even though people are no better than other mammals, you will find someone with whom previously repulsive activities will suddenly become pleasant]. In either case, Tsangari’s accomplishment is that her detached manner exhibits no Haneke-type haughtiness. All in all, I’d like to think it’s the latter. But even if it is, there is something quite sad about the fact that people are no better than animals in Sir David Attenborough’s programmes, where he says: “If there was ever a possibility to escape human condition and live imaginatively, it must be with a gorilla”.