#me and sam share a most glorious ethos

[forestofsprites]

as a wizard said but a few moments earlier, there are other forces at work in this world besides the will of evil! and as a friend will say a great many months later, it'll be spring soon! and as frodo himself did, we will arm that beautiful lovely knowledge & carry on

[tilbageidanmark]

Movies I watched this week (Year 4, week 7)

Lord You Have Seduced Me, And I Was Seduced.

Into great silence is an unhurried, almost-wordless, 3-hour-long German documentary about the everyday life at the Grande Chartreuse monastery. About 2 dozen elderly men live there at the French Alps, in solitude and stillness, praying, doing penance & singing praises to God.

The director asked the order for permission to record the movie in 1984, and received their response 16 years later. He then lived with them in the cloister for 6 months, filming and recording on his own, and using only available light and sound. It's a meditative, hypnotic reflection into the ascetic life. 7/10.

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LIGO (Director's Cut) is a different, most absorbing documentary about the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory ("LIGO") and the painstaking path taken toward realizing and releasing their first major observation. It's a lot of smart scientists talking about doing complex science in an accessible way. Absolutely fascinating, even if - like me - you have no clue what they are talking about. 9/10.

If you are the type of person who likes this sort of thing, you'll probably like this.

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The Wyoming's 1892 Johnson County War X 2:

🍿  Michael Cimino's epic western Heaven's Gate, the movie that killed the auteur movement, the 70's, and the one that started the enshittification of Hollywood. A bleak anti-western about the war against foreigners - and poor people in general - so relevant to today's ethos.

A magnificent, leisurely-told story (I watched the "Radical cut" of 219 minutes), with a serious ensemble: Not only Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Brad Dourif, Isabelle Huppert, Jeff Bridges, and Joseph Cotten, but also Mickey Rourke, Willem Dafoe and T Bone Burnett in small roles. Not that different from his earlier 'Deer Hunter', so why did it fail so spectacularly? (Photo Above)

🍿 "Shane! Come back!..."

First watch: The glorious technicolor western Shane, with very 1950's vibes and style. A mysterious gunslinger slings into (the picture), and Joey, a cloyingly-blond boy is enthralled by his mystique. Jean Arthur last film. 7/10.

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Times are hard, and I need to replenish my resources of Léa Seydoux. The Last Mistress is a 2007 aristocratic period piece by Catherine Breillat about sexual obsession and societal expectations. Unfortunately, this was only Léa Seydoux's second film, so she only had a small role in it as a chambermaid. 6/10.

/ Female Director

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As a child, I loved the books by mysterious writer B. Traven X 2:

🍿 Macario, an unexpected 1960 supernatural fable, my first by Roberto Gavaldón. Considered one of the greatest Mexican films which were not made by Luis Buñuel. 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the first Mexican film nominated for an Oscar. A poor woodcutter with 5 or 6 children who are always hungry, is dreaming of eating a whole turkey all by himself, but when he gets the once in a lifetime chance to do so, he shares it with an apparition of a man claiming to be even hungrier. For that, he is turned into a miraculous healer. What a gem! With the beautiful Pina Pellicer. 8/10.

🍿 "... Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges..."

I never realized that this quote was from the fantastic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a story about all-for-nothing greed. With an award-winning performances by Walter Huston as the grizzled gold prospector, and a cameo by his son John Huston. Also, Humphrey Bogart, in the best role of his career, playing against type as an insane paranoiac loser. A good portion of the movie was spoken in Spanish without subtitles or translation.

First watch - 9/10.

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Switzerland in 1975. I remember the didactic Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 from so many years ago as that important social-political manifesto of the times. But looking back at this group of people struggling with the failed revolutions of the 1960's, it's just outdated, dispirited and resigned. Sad and frustrated Marxism.

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Michael Winterbottom's comfortable travelogue The trip to Greece, one of the only few series that I actually watched in full. A light, fictionalized version of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, as they drive for the 4th time to touristy locations, indulge in eating tasty dishes, and celebrate their friendship while playfully argue with each other. It's middle-brow travel-porn with money shots of food and vistas. The highlights of all these movies are always their impersonations of other celebrities. There's a diminishing rate of return with each new chapter in this saga, since they are basically always the same.

[It ends though with a rendering of Max Richter's On the Nature of Daylight, which is lovely.]

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I loved Alice Wu's two queer rom-roms very much when I saw them a couple of years ago. So a Valentine Day re-watching of The half of it seemed natural. The cute Chinese teen, super-smart social-outcast, who lives alone with her dad, and who falls in love with another girl, sounded right up my alley. But on second look, it feels more like any other Netflix teen-drama, full of all the tropes and cliches you'd expect from one.

/ Female Director

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A monster call, a dark fantasy about a boy whose mother is dying. I hardly ever watch these type of CGI-generated fairy tales where anthropomorphic trees can walk and anything can happen. Not my cup of tea. With Sigourney Weaver. 2/10.

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2 with Emily Mortimer:

🍿  Harry Brown is a bloody and ugly vigilante, a-la 'Death Wish', with Old Man Michael Caine going medieval on the ass of the Clockwork Orange gang in his run-down housing estate. The only tiny sliver of redeeming value was Caine as the quiet, lonely pensioner who used to have 'a particular set of skills' in the old days when he served in Northern Ireland. 2/10.

🍿 TransSiberian, a pathetic 'thriller' about drugs and murder on a Russian train. Weak story, poor direction and un-charismatic actors (including another Woody Harrelson role as a Christian missionary worker, the 2nd time in two weeks). 1/10.

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Juzo Itami's Supermarket Woman from 1996. A broad - very broad - folk comedy about "Hanako", an ordinary housewife who help a fledgling local supermarket turn around. Far away from 'Tampopo', but Itami still managed to build some small emotional payouts. It ends with a giant chase by a pimped up Dekotora truck. 3/10.

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I have no idea how I came to watch the Australian TV series Fisk. A slight comedy about a strangely-calibrated middle-aged female lawyer who takes a job at a small firm in Melbourne which specialize in wills and probates. With bits of snappy dialogue and a few good jokes, it was light and breezy. But after 4 short episodes, I got the picture and signed off.

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3 by Yugoslav animator Dušan Vukotić, and a few other shorts:

🍿  Vukotić was a co-founder of the 'Zagreb School'. His Surogat ('The Substitute') was the first foreign film to win the Oscar for animated short. A minimalist poem of whimsical shapes, reminiscent of the Italian 'La Linea'. A fat man goes to the beach and inflates every object in sight.

🍿 Cow on the moon, another charming gag of a girl fooling a bully to believe he landed on the moon.

🍿 Igra ('The game') is a terrific live-action/animation hybrid. Pencil drawings by a boy and a girl start fighting with each other. 8/10.

🍿 The experimental 1965 The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics earned cartoonist Chuck Jones his only Oscar as a producer. It's an abstract romance, in a Saul Bass geometric style, with specific early-60's message of 'Victory of the Bohemian over the Square'.

🍿 Re-watch: Kid auto race at Venice, Charlie Chaplin first appearance as The Trump, 1914 - Colorized!

🍿 My Mom Is an Airplane! a cute fantasy for small kids by Russian Yulia Aronova.

/ Female Director

🍿 Kabul Sea (2010), a short little documentary by a female Afghani director, Alka Sadat.

/ Female Director

🍿 The pixel painter tells of Hal Lasko, a retired graphic designer who started creating digital art on Microsoft Paint after his 85th birthday. The conversations of his family which was left behind him are banal, but the illustrations are delightful.

🍿 The Beauty Of Past Lives and The Beauty Of French Cinema from a YouTube channel that does Video edits.

🍿 Riding shotgun, a strange 6-minute animated story about 2 'horny' assassins filled to the brim with weird sex, violence. coke and dirty toilets. Not for me.

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My first film by Gaspar Noé (and surely also his last?), We fuck alone from 2006. The story is simple: A man and a woman masturbate to the same porn film in different rooms, under intense and irritating strobe lighting. That’s it. It’s literal porn, and the only place I could stream it was on a Pornhub clone.

I have zero objections to porn, but here I have to quote Malcolm Tucker (in conversation with 'In the loop' Linton Barwik): “I've come across a lot of psychos, but none as fucking boring as you! I mean, you are a real boring fuck! Sorry, I know you disapprove of the swearing, so I'll sort that. You are a boring eff-star-star-cunt.” 1/10.

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..."Jack was pumping up a flat on the truck out on a back road when the tire blew up. The bead was damaged somehow and the force of the explosion slammed the rim into his face, broke his nose and jaw and knocked him unconscious on his back. By the time someone came along he had drowned in his own blood..."

First time read: Brokeback mountain, Annie Proulx's fine piece of short story, first published in the New Yorker. After re-watching Anne Hathaway's hurting face in that scene...

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(My complete movie list is here)