#if we have to wait another half a year or more for Meursault now i will commit Dazai!!!!!!

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it sure has been a wild last few days in the BSD fandom huh

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Movies I watched this Week #121 (Year 3/Week 17):

This week I watched more “Foreign” films (19) and more films by female directors (15) than usual. The best ones were: Lynne Ramsay's 'Gasman' and 'Ratcatcher', 'All night long', and 'Summer 1993'.

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Carmen Jones squarely belongs to the beautiful Dorothy Dandridge, for which she was nominated for Best Actress Oscar, first for an African-American. Harry Belafonte played the sap who falls for her, is betrayed by her and who finally kills her in a jealous rage. The song numbers were all done in single shots, and the opening title sequence was the first one created by Saul Bass.

RIP, Harry Belafonte.

“About my own life, I have no complaints. Yet the problems faced by most Americans of color seem as dire and entrenched as they were half a century ago.”

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Scottish Auteur Lynne Ramsay X 7:

She only made 4 feature films and before this week I’ve only seen her most recent one, the dark and ‘Taxi Driver’-violent ‘You were never really there’, which did not speak to me. But because I keep reading that she’s one of the most important female directors of our time, I wanted to check out the rest of her work.

🍿 Morvern Callar, her second feature, took a while to get me. Driftless, precarious supermarket worker Samantha Morton seemed to have no center. One Christmas morning she finds that her boyfriend had killed himself on their kitchen floor, and like Meursault in ‘The Stranger’ by Camus, she’s overwhelmed by her inability to process her emotions. But he left her a manuscript of a novel, and she replaces his name with hers and sends it to a publisher mentioned in his suicide note. Another modern classic it resembles is Antonioni’s ‘The Passenger': As she reinvents herself with his persona, she travels from her small Scottish town south to Andalusia, and eventually finds herself in the middle of nowhere, on a dusty mountain road without any plans, or idea what to do. By the ‘Dedicated to the One I Love’ ending, it all falls into place.

🍿 Her early, 15-minute masterpiece Gasman became an immediate favorite. A poetic gem without a single unnecessary frame or word. An 8-year-old goes to a Christmas party at the local inn with her dad and brother, and on the way they meet a woman who leaves 2 other children with the dad. The way the story discloses that the girls are half-sisters is silently and unbearably heartbreaking - 10/10!

🍿 “The very thought of you”...

Things left untold in the haunting short Swimmer, pure cinematic poetry in motion, all exquisite allusions without any explanations. 8/10

🍿 All her early shorts won prestigious awards and established her as a superb visual filmmaker. Small deaths was her film school graduation short. It captures a young girl’s pain. 

🍿 But only when watching her poetic debut feature Ratcatcher, that I understood why Lynne Ramsay is considered to be one of world cinema’s best visionaries. Not knowing anything in advance about it, I was not prepared for its visual gut punch. Beauty and misery among “the garbage and the flowers”. The non-redeemable, poor children of the working class neighborhood in 1973 Glasgow. Mesmerizing pain, transformative guilt, transcendental grace - one of the best well-made movies I ‘ever’ saw!

🍿 I was reluctant to finish with the depressing We Need to Talk About Kevin, since I’m not big on dramas with Omen-like psychopath children, school shooting tragedies and damaged, long-suffering mothers. Throughout the movie, mom Tilda Swinton is washing blood out, trying to atone. Disturbing and not a pleasure trip for sure.

🍿 All her films are about parental abandonment and existential sadness. Now that I’ve seen them all, I can understand her appeal. So meanwhile, here’s Tony Zhou, of ‘Every Frame a Picture’, talking about The Poetry of Details of Lynne Ramsay (From 2015).

And I can’t wait for her next feature “I feel fine”.

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Ang Lee’s 2nd feature, The Wedding Banquet, part of his early “Father Knows Best” trilogy. Surprisingly, it’s another unapologetic mainstream story about a gay couple, done more than a decade before his ‘Brokeback Mountain’. It tells of a young Taiwanese immigrant in Manhattan, whose parents want him to marry a nice Chinese woman, not knowing that he's been living with his boyfriend [Roy Lichtenstein’s real son] for the last 5 years. Like Peter Weir’s Green Card, he agrees to fake-marry a nice woman who needs a green card, but his parents come and throw him a huge party. It gets a bit implausible.

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2 surprising Othello adaptations:

🍿 My second intelligent enigma by forgotten British director Basil Dearden! A week ago I discovered his seminal gay blackmail Noir ‘Victim’ about closeted barrister Dirk Bogards, and I promised myself to look for other works by him. His very next All Night Long did not disappoint.

It re-creates Shakespeare's ‘Othello’ in a 1962 Swinging London jazz jam. Patrick McGoohan is drummer Johnny, a scheming, pot-smoking Iago who prowls the party stirring up jealousy and fear to tear the interracial couple of regal bandleader Aurelius Rex and his wife Delia apart, so that Delia will sing with Johnny when he leaves Othello's band.

It’s a superbly tense tragedy that takes place in one location and in the course of one evening, It mixes a thriller with authentic jazz performances and score, and it casually presents Race (2 mixed race couples are treated in matter-of-fact way) as well as marijuana usage which is part of the plot, but used without any comment.

With young Richard Attenborough and several prominent Jazz musicians including Dave Brubeck and Charles Mingus. There’s also the majestic performance of black lead actor Paul Harris as ‘The Moor”: Magnetic and unforgettable!

The trailer. 9/10!

🍿 Desdemona, one of the earliest screen adaptations of Othello, a silent film from 1911. It was directed by August Blom, a pioneer of Danish ‘golden age’ of erotic melodramas. Hard to figure out what’s happening, but what great hats the dames wore.

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My first by Danish director Martin Zandvliet, A funny man (”Dirch”). It’s a traditional bio-pic about legendary local comedian and actor Dirch Passer. I loved the way it depicted theatrical life in Copenhagen of the 50′s and 60′s. With good performances by current stars of the Danish screen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Lars Ranthe and Lars Brygmann. A solid, personal 8/10.

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The 2 award-winning Catalan dramas made by Carla Simón:

🍿 Alcarràs, a Spanish drama about a family of Catalan farmers, whose peach orchard which they had tended for 2 generations is sold from under them to be uprooted and used as a solar farm. Played convincingly by non-actors, especially the little girl Iris was pitch-perfect. Some scenes (like the family singing) were superb. 7/10. (Photo Above)

🍿 Her debut feature Summer 1993, was a heartbreaking story about a 6-year-old orphan who has to live with her uncle’s family in the country, after both her parents had died of AIDS. It’s a tender and intimate description of small gestures and inner turmoil. Tremendous “acting” by two little girls, the main subject, as well as her new 3-year-old step-sister.

100% ‘Fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes from 97 reviews. This film is also auto-biographical, as Simón’s real parents also died from AIDS when she was 6, and she had to live with her uncle's family in Catalonia. 9/10.

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Fat, Bald, Short Man, my second Colombian film (after the masterful ‘Embrace of the serpent’). A singular animation feature, using minimalist, nearly abstract, rotoscoping. A story of an invisible middle-age salaryman, Antonio Farfán, who is hampered by his ordinary looks and low self-esteem. 5/10.

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2 more by Sarah Polley:

🍿 Her debut feature, Away from her. Adapted from the Alice Munro short story, another difficult topic: Julie Christie suffers from Alzheimer's and must be put away in a home. There’s no surprise here, and it goes only in one direction.  

🍿 Take this Waltz, a standard Ménage à trois romantic comedy whereby Michelle Williams is happily married to chicken cookbook author Seth Rogen, but falls in love with the rickshaw driver / hipster-artist across the street. It’s hard to take husband Seth Rogen seriously, and even the Leonard Cohen montage doesn’t elevate the story to more than what it is.

Now that I’ve seen all four of Sarah Polley films, her documentary ‘Stories we tell” is the only memorable one, in my eyes.

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“The gorillas beat him to death before the zookeepers could gas them all...”

“Frag Waving” Team America: World Police, one of the few action movies I can stand, a vulgar satire of Bush’s militaristic war on the “Terrorists”, and a parody of cliches for everything from Hollywood to politics to American values. The version I saw did not have the complete X-rated puppet sex scene I remember from before, but oh well. Still 7/10.

Also: ��You are worthress, Arec Barrwin!”

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2 by french director Rebecca Zlotowski:

🍿 Grand Central, my 14th infatuated film with Léa Seydoux (who seems to have a permanent clause in all her contracts that she must have at least 2 crying scenes in each - not that I mind). She starts a lukewarm romance with some block, an unskilled laborer with no personality, while living with the guy’s supervisor in a trailer next door. At the same time, they all work at a French nuclear plant, as manual sub-contractors, without having any qualifications, and get exposed to dangerous radiations all the time. Two arbitrary and unconvincing plots that fell flat. 3/10.

🍿 Zlotowski’s latest drama Other People's Children was better, because it had a more ‘normal’, adult story. A childless 40-year-old woman falls in love with a divorced man who has a four-year-old-daughter, and tries, unsuccessfully to fit in their lives. 5/10.

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I was the biggest Beatles fan there was in the 60′s, but I never saw the reconstructed, cheesy Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with Peter Frampston (?) and the Bee-gees before. Embarrassing and Disneyland-style kitschy, it made me ashamed to be alive during the excessive 70′s. Many atrocities involved (George Burns ‘Fixin’ a hole’, Donald Pleasence as a pimp, Steve Martin in Maxwell Silver Hammer, Aerosmith ‘Come Together’, nearly every other “parody” song), with zero redeeming qualities. 1/10.

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Cracks, the only film directed by Jordan Scott, Ridley Scott's daughter. The genre of British period films about Boarding School for Girls is not my strong cup of tea, and neither is this one. A lesbian love triangle and sexual jealousy between a teacher and her two students on the diving team ended up clichéd. With young Juno Temple and neurotic Eva Green. 2/10.

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Re-watch: Play it again, Sam, an early and typical Woody Allen comedy, written by him, starred by him (together with past and future girlfriends), but directed by Herbert Ross. 50 years later, it’s dated and unfunny. 2/10.

Should I now re-watch ‘True Romance’, my favorite Tarantino film, in which he based Val Kilmer’s Elvis on the Bogard character from here?

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There were already 70 Covid-19 films, according to Wikipedia. Of the ones I saw, ‘Bo Burnham: Inside’ and ‘Locked Down' were my favorites.

But the new Life upside down is not. I only watched it because it was directed by a woman, and starred Bob Odenkirk. But these 5-6 shallow LA-characters were tiring and uninteresting. The only innovating aspect of this boring film was disclosed during the end credits: The fact that it was shot remotely over Zoom. 2/10.

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(My complete movie list is here)