Cinema Outcasts » Joseph

The Seventh Seal

joseph — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 02:18:48 +0000

I have had a hard time picking a tenth film in our “Editor’s Choice” series (which may not have been that big of a deal, since I don’t remember when we decided to put a limit at 10 or if we’re still doing that). I was debating putting the Quay Brothers’ Institute Benjamenta here, which is a beautiful film but I wouldn’t know what to say about it, and anyways I think Ingmar Bergman should be recognized here. I almost wanted to list his later film Winter Light simply because of the devastating brilliance of the last line spoken in the film, which is so astonishingly anticlimactic it stays with you for a long time. I could even go with his more lighthearted Smiles of a Summer Night, which has a poetic rhythm mirroring the comedies of Shakespeare, or Trollflöjten which is a flawlessly cheeky-yet-faithful adaption of a Mozart’s Magic Flute Opera (though I decided to rule that out because it was made for Swedesh Television). The Seventh Seal is a great place to start with Bergman, an abstract, timeless classic that depicts a medieval knight’s battle with Death in the shape of an absurd game of chess. The absurdity of it is in the fact that everyone’s life is a game played with death that we will all eventually “lose,” it’s only a matter of when; we are all being strung along in an inescapable dance of death. Bergman is known for making depressing films — he has even admitted he can’t watch his own movies because they bring him down — but films that deal with hopelessness or existential despair can often reveal a sense of inner strength that is lacking in films with the so-called “Hollywood ending.” Bergman’s films deal with the anxieties and doubts that we all have, and he has the courage to say that there aren’t necessarily any easy answers, or angels to save us, but we are all in this same wayward ship, and sometimes telling this truth can be uplifting in it’s own way.

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T

joseph — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 02:07:31 +0000

The only live action film written by Ted Geisel (A.K.A. Dr. Seuss), this film is like if Road Dahl had written a version of the Music Man while on shrooms and gave the script to Julie Taymor to direct, and while I haven’t actually seen any of Julie Taymor’s films it seems like the best way to describe this movie. Jello Biafra has said this is one of the weirdest movies he’s ever seen, but as bizzarre as The 5,000 Fingers is, the most surprising thing about the film is the brilliant sense of comic timing of it. I can’t think of a single other movie that has made me laugh so much, at least while sober. Hans Conried, who’s voice you might recognize from about a billion animated films over the past several decades (notably Captain Hook and Mr. Darling in Disney’s Peter Pan), is brilliant as the flamboyant Dr. Terwilliker, an evil piano instructor who turns into a mad, child-enslaving professor in the boredom induced fever dream of a young boy named Bart.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

joseph — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 01:55:35 +0000

As far as I can tell, this Woody Allen film is the closest thing the US has to an Ingmar Bergman movie, which makes sense because Allen was a big admirer of Bergman and had a similarly morbid disposition. A modern response to Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Crimes and Misdemeanors is a film where religion, philosophy, art, and love are revealed to be ultimately flawed affectations, incomplete, incapable of dealing with the reality of an arbitrary universe void of any sense of mystical justice or penance. A philosophy teacher who advocates a positive worldview unexpectedly kills himself, an idealistic Rabbi begins going blind both literally and symbolically, and a well-to-do doctor who is plagued with the guilt of an unspeakable crime learns that there is no impending atonement or retribution for his crime. We are all searching for an answer to this life, a light at the end of a stale tunnel, but all that is found is the ineffable void of at the edge of a system that has never rewarded or punished based on merit. There is no real justice, at least not in a supernal sense. All we have is the present moment, the will to carry on, and help lighten the load on those we care about.

Dawn of the Dead

joseph — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 01:49:17 +0000

There’s a reason George Romero is the only director of zombie films that has name recognition, aside from the fact that he invented the genre. He takes the fun of zombies seriously, while simultaneously having some fun with serious philosophical questions that arise in a zombie apocalypse. When one of the protagonists says of the undead “they are us,” one is forced to ask “what is the difference between hoards of zombies storming into a shopping mall, and the living human beings who do the same thing?” The answer, represented in the movie in the form of helicopter ascending beyond a strange horizon, is this: potentiality.

Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn

joseph — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 01:28:34 +0000

Most people seem to either prefer the first Evil Dead film or Army of Darkness when the subject of the Evil Dead trilogy comes up. These people are full of shit, because Evil Dead 2 is clearly the best film in Sam Raimi’s honestly-sort-of-meh-overall carreer. It’s the Godfather II of horror sequels, and it has everything that makes Raimi worth watching: Three Stooges humor, over the top gore and violence, and of course, Bruce Campbell with a chainsaw as a hand. At times, the film reaches a level of surrealty on par with Lynch’s Eraiserhead, a feat few horror filmakers nowadays would have the imagination of sense of humor to aspire to.

Crazy Love (1897)

joseph — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:44:26 +0000

Charles Bukowski has said that this was the best performance of his “Henry Chinaski” character yet, which shows that Bukowski’s stories translate just fine in other parts of the world. This three-act Belgian film is taken from Bukowski’s various short stories and novels and tells the story of a young man’s gradual descent from bashful romantic to self-destructive alcoholic pervert, and the story is told with the grim sense of humor and honesty that is found in the Bukowski brand. This is a great movie to watch alone, with a twelve pack of beer, or with a few bottles of wine and your favorite whore on those loneliest of nights.

Once Upon a Time in the West

joseph — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:30:51 +0000

Although it was not as impactful perhaps as the “Dollar” trilogy, this is my favorite Sergio Leone — and “Spaghetti Western” — film. A sweeping, beautifully paced journey through a world that probably never existed until folk like John Ford and Akira Kurosawa helped germinate it in the mind of the Italian filmaker. Charles Bronson as the tortured hero seems like a constant dam about to burst with machisimo, Henry Fonda is brilliantly cast as the depraved villian, and you can’t not like Jason Robard’s bandit-with-a-heart-of-gold, who Leone reportedly told Ennio Morricone that he was like the “Tramp from Lady and the Tramp.” Claudia Cardinale plays the worshipfull Jill, a brave-faced ex-prostitute who inherits some very valuable property on the American frontier, but in the saddest way possible.

Rashomon

joseph — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:14:54 +0000

It may be debatable which is the best Kurosawa film, but this one is my personal favorite. It’s a work of bold, abstract beauty that questions reality by consensus. A rape and murder mystery is told and re-told from different perspectives (we even get a version of the story as told by the spirit of the murdered man, via medium). Each person has a completely different version of what occurred, and the mystery is never really “solved.” We are left doubting that any of the actors were telling the “true” version of what happened. Man is revealed as a creature who’s self-image is guarded jealously against a cold reality, which causes a Monk to nearly despair against the whole of mankind, until, in the midst of the fog in a desolate town in feudal Japan, a glimmer of hope is found.

Tideland

joseph — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 20:49:11 +0000

Like my other favorite Cría Cuervos, here’s another film dealing with innocence, death, and escapism from harsh realities, also starring a young girl. I mention this film and Cría first because it is so rare to find films about childhood that don’t Spielberg-ify them into idyllic stories of politically correct Haley Joel Osmond caricatures being bullied and then winning against all odds due to either the power of their imagination, a talking dog, or a school that teaches witchcraft. Terry Gilliam’s Tideland is his (and novelist Mitch Cullin’s) eschatological version of Alice in Wonderland, but no magic mushrooms are needed in this story — the reality of protagonist Jeliza-Rose is just as surreal and grotesque as her daydreams and it is often hard to determine which is which. Critics hated this film, largely because it portrays childhood and innocence not in the standard platonic sense, but as something that is by definition morally ambivalent, equally susceptible to good and ill, something that many in the grown-up world chose not to remember.

Cría cuervos…

joseph — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 20:33:06 +0000

Decades before the critically acclaimed Pan’s Labyrinth elevated director Guillermo del Toro from “comic book movie guy” to “serious film maker,” Carlos Saura had already made a film dealing with the subjects of fascism and death as seen through the eyes of a young girl in Spain after the Civil War, and while Saura’s film lacks the visual flair that marks del Torro’s work, it has a maturity and depth that the former lacks. It is the haunting story not of the loss of innocence, but of an innocence that is forced to deal with a tragic reality that surrounds it, and subsequently becomes morbidly ambivalent towards these very “grownup” concepts. Young Ana, the middle sister to three orphaned girls, fantasizes about death as a way of getting closer to her deceased mother, and as a way of escaping the stifling life as the daughter of a late military man in Fascist Spain. The story paints a candid picture of childhood as “interminable, sad, full of fear, fear of the unknown,” but this picture is painted at times with moments of humor and affection. What this film lacks, however, is a cloying quality that most films about childhood have, which makes the sense of loss all the more real and haunting.