#if anything it's funnier if his parents are like. unobtrusive in his life and because of that he's just like:

[dangans-ur-ronpas]

enough of 'this character is an asshole because their parents are abusive!!' we need to stop pushing the idea that abusive parents are the only asshole-making trauma that exist. sometimes the trauma can be from a grief or loss that changes you deeply, to the point where everything else stops looking like it's worth being treasured. sometimes the rudeness can be from being so jaded at a world that keeps kicking you when you're down, to the point that it's either fight back or just take it. sometimes the parents aren't outright cruel or abusive but divorced,

[tilbageidanmark]

Movies I watched this week - 28

3 by Miyazaki:

✳️✳️✳️ Never-Ending Man: Another wonderful NHK documentary about Old Man Hayao Miyazaki after his 2013 retirement, and as he slowly comes around to create one more animation, the short ‘Boro The Caterpillar’. It follows him unobtrusively for a couple of years, walking from his simple house to his office at the studio, drawing drawing, struggling with self doubt and old age, and yes - driving a bit in his old Citroën 2CV.

It’s such a privilege to be so close to a legendary artist and watch him at close range - 8/10.

✳️✳️✳️ Kiki's Delivery Service, one of my most favorite Ghibli masterpieces, about a 13 year old witch, who flies on a broom to a new city in order to build her independence. With a magical score by Joe Hisaishi. 

- Best film of the week!

✳️✳️✳️ Castle in the sky, Miyazaki’s 3rd feature from 1986, an cyberpunk adventure fantasy which contains many of the elements and characters which will show up fully formed in his later films: Sheeta looks like Kiki, Dola behaves like Yubaba, Pazu as a stand in for Haku, etc. I prefer his quieter, more personal, smaller stories.

✴️

Exit Plan (“Suicide Tourist”) is a Danish film about a quiet man with a terminal brain tumor who signs up for an upscale Norwegian hotel specializing in assisted end-of-life fantasies. Starts as a dark existential tale, ends with a kind of ambiguous mystery.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is the guy.

✴️

The Aerial  (”La Antena”) is an innovative Argentinian silent film from 2007,  about a city that had lost its voice, and its only savior, a boy without eyes who is crucified on a Star of David. It’s a surreal allegory in German expressionism style, a weird black & white fantasy about mind control. In short, a unique and inaccessible fairy tale.

“Mommy, are you there?...”

(Photo Above)

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For comparison, I revisited ‘Un Chien Andalou’, Bunuel & Dalí disturbing, groundbreaking masterpiece. Even though every outrageous frame of it is part of history now, the raw imagery is still shocking - Pure id. I can’t imagine being in the room in 1929, and watching it for the first time. No wonder the two surrealists were disappointed at the audience's positive reception.

✴️

2 from French director Mia Hansen-Løve:

✳️✳️✳️ The Future / “Things to come“ from 2016. Isabelle Huppert is a resilient middle-aged philosophy professor whose life suddenly suffers multiple setbacks.

It only has 6 scenes with background music, each punctures the quiet delivery of the story at an emotional peak: A Schubert lieder, a Woodie Guthrie song on the radio, a lullaby...

I loved it!

✳️✳️✳️ Goodbye First Love tells about a romance between a 15 year old and a boy who leaves her, and then comes back 8 years later, after she settles down.

Unhurried, sensitive story-telling, reminisces of Eric Rohmer, with careful use of music and language. It also has a couple of scenes shot here at the Kastrup Sea Baths and on the grounds of Louisiana museum.

Loved it! I’m looking forward to see her new ‘’Bergman Island’.

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Love in the afternoon, the last of Eric Rohmer’s ‘6 Moral Tales’. Exploration of sexual and spiritual virtues in 1972 Paris, by a traditional married man who carries on a platonic love affair with an old flame.

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The White Ribbon - Austrian Michael Haneke’s dark, multi-layered tragedy. In 1913, a series of upsetting events occur in a small German village. A horse trips on a wire and injures its rider; a woman falls to her death through rotted planks; the local baron's son is hung upside down in a mill; parents bully their children; a man torments his long-suffering lover; another sexually abuses his daughter. People disappear.

Relentless inquiry into abuse, cruelty and despair. Shot in gorgeous Bergmansk black & white.

(This is an Italian speaking copy). 8/10

✴️

2 more from 1973:

✳️✳️✳️ First watch - Soylent Green, a pessimistic science fiction story happening in 2022. Very prescient in its dystopian prediction of global warming, over population, resource depletion and income equality.

The 2 minutes opening montage was paced brilliantly. 7/10

✳️✳️✳️ In Scarecrow, Gene Hackman and Al Pacino are two drifters who becomes friends as they hitchhike from California to Pittsburgh. 6/10

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In Pig, Nicholas Cage is a reclusive mountain man, living out in the woods outside Portland, OR, gathering truffles with a female pig, who is his only friend. One night, some tweakers attack him and kidnap the pig. His journey to bring her back takes him on a surprising and completely unexpected places. 

Very un-American!

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“… and Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln”

6 episodes of the 1982 TV series Police Squad!,  a spoof of police procedurals - shorter and funnier than the Naked Gun movies which it later spawned. Zucker-Abrams-Zucker production.

“Who are you? And how did you get in here?

- "I'm a locksmith, and I'm a locksmith”

✴️

“Ever fired your gun in the air and yelled, 'Aaaaaaah?'”

Every time I watch Hot Fuzz, it gets better. "Not just one of the best comedies of all time, it’s one of the best movies of all time", for sure.

Editor Tony Zhou, of ‘Every Frame A Painting’, shot an excellent video essay ‘How to do visual comedy’ about Edgar Wright.

Jim Broadbent as Inspector Frank Butterman: “He had one thing you haven't got... A great, big, bushy beard! “

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Re-watch: Wag the Dog, blackest of black comedies, utterly cynical, nihilistic view of politics. Americans can always be distracted, can always be manipulated, and can always be led to believe anything the powers-to-be needs them to. You can fool all of the people all of the time. 

“Look, look, look. He's fine as long as he gets his medications...”

Amazingly, it premiered one month BEFORE the Lewinsky scandal!

✴️

The Invisible Guest, a forgettable and predictable Spanish murder-mystery thriller from 2016. Best part was the soft, minimalist European style score (or am I just going deaf?)

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How to Become a Tyrant, a new docu-series narrated by Peter Dinklage. 6 short episodes about Hitler, Stalin, Gaddafi, Kim Il-sung, Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein. (Mao is referred to, but doesn’t get his own chapter).

And it doesn’t mention trump, even as a Wanna be Dictator - probably because he didn’t succeed in his (first) attempt.

✴️

Seaspiracy, the most depressing documentary I’ve ever seen. Ali Tabrizi starts investigating plastic pollution in the ocean, and quickly realizes that it is commercial fishing that is the bane of our existence. Basically all fishing must be banned, as there will be no more live fish in the seas in 2048. There were some ‘controversies’ about the claims the movie makes, but they came from mainstream entities, who support incremental change.

Utterly disgusting: We deserve all that befall us.

✴️

A colorful and dramatic Vatican drama, The Two Popes, with excellent ‘Odd Couple’ performances by Anthony Hopkins as the first Pope in 700 years to step down and by Jonathan Pryce who doesn’t want to succeed him. Re-watch.

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Throw-back to the art project:

Salvador Dali Adora.

Kiki Delivery Service Adora.

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(My complete movie list is here)