I'm planning on posting about movies I watched recently much more often... I used to be hardcore into movies a year ago watching at least 3 every day of the week. I've restarted recently, but as my memory flows fast I only remember the ones I watched in the last couple of days ahah
I'm not gonna make any real review or plot summary (there's imdb for that), I'm only going to express my personal opinion.
I love talking about movies with people so please let's artfaggy discuss about any cinematic masterpiece we can!
Angela (1995) - Rebecca MillerA movie between Maladolescenza and Tideland, with more "magical" elements. I didn't really understand the plot well enough I guess, Angela's mom is insane and the little girl tries to escape from a difficult family situation creating a magical world for herself, etc. etc. (insert plot from any other movie about little girls here).
Is the "insanity" (I'd rather call it a mental instability, as she's far from being a real insane person) of Angela's mother enough of a reason for Angela to imagine angels, ghosts an Lucifer himself with red lipstick?
The movie is way too realistic for having these out of place immaginary elements and making sense at the same time. On one side we have the kitchen-sink drama of Angela's parents life and on the other these Pan's labyrinth or Valerie and her week of wanters inspired scenes, and they really don't make sense with each other.
In the end I didn't dislike the movie, it was really pleasant to watch, I've spotted a microphone showing in the top of the scenes a couple of times, and I understand that the movie was shot with a low budget and with no artistic presumption, which made me see the movie from a far easier angle.
It doesn't go in my "top 10 best little girls movies ever" though. It's a very unassuming movie, it doesn't want to go "too far", and I honestly expected more from it.
If.... (1968) - Lindsay AndersonBasically an earlier version of Alan Clarke's "Scum". Malcom McDowell was awesome (as always) in this movie just like Ray Winstone was in Scum, and I have a legendary crush on both of them.
I really digged the movie, young beautiful college boys and torture really work for me. It didn't have the rape scene that Scum has but it didn't change my opinion on the movie for a second.
Karakkaze yarô (1960) - Yasuzo MasumuraI usually don't like yakuza movies... but how can you not watch a Yasuzo Masumura movie starring Yukio Mishima?!
Like my other favourite movie by Masumura "Akai Tenshi" this is a love story that ends really badly.
A movie with Mishima that has apparently nothing to do with him, that seems far from the other movie written, directed and starring him "Patriotism - the rite of life and death", but still I managed to see in it much more than what the movie superficially shows.
First of all I didn't agree with the title, it seems to me that Takeo (Yukio Mishima) more than "afraid to die" is struggling for his life, for his freedom from the yakuza world in which he grew up his whole life and which he doesn't like or want to be a part of, and for his love. I don't know, maybe this is just a bland Yakuza movie, maybe I am wrong, but I still saw a slight parallelism with Yukio Mishima's life. I am not giving it a 10 or saying this film is a must-see, but it was one of the few yakuza movies I actually enjoyed watching.
Sedmikrásky (1966) - Vera ChytilováThis movie has been on my pc for a while... I thought this was a movie that actually looks better in stills and I've read plenty of reviews in which it was called a Czech New Wave masterpiece.
At first I thought it was a very gimmicky, annoying, pretentious movie, and I abandoned it for a while. I am quite a fan of Czech New Wave and movies like "Morgiana", "Sweet Movie" or "Valerie a týden divu" are some of my favourite movies ever.
I thought this movie was an unfunny and childish parody on French New Wave, and I couldn't understand if it was humour or a pretentious attempt of the director to make a dadaist statement on social realism. It took me till the end to understand the actual humour of the movie, with the scene that reminded me of Ferreri's "La grande bouffe". What is sure is that Czech directors are obsessed with food (see "Sweet Movie")!
Behind the layer of silly dada sensless lacking plot of this movie hide impressivly sensitive subjects, such as the struggle of men between destruction and creation, the trascendental seek for the self and the endless human wish for happiness. For this reason I've seen in this movie a bigger parallelism with some French New Wave, and a big similarity with Makavejev's "Sweet Movie". I forgot about the annoying behaviour of the two girls acting like they were 5 year olds, their excessive use of eye make up, the hypotetical feminist statement of the director, and the - in most parts - unfunny humour and in the end I really liked this movie.
Not to mention that all the scenes are pure awesome, even reminding me in some parts of Shuji Terajama's work.
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Additionally I've also watched Pascal Laugier's
"Martyrs". This movie was a complete disaster, I don't know where to start from.
If this movie was not presented with an artistic presumptuousness, if it hadn't been compared to Gaspar Noe', if it wasn't made so ridiculous and unrealistic but maybe more like Fabrice Du Welz's "Calvaire", if it had been taken by everybody else like the mediocre torture porn that it is and not like an arthouse masterpiece, then maybe I would have disliked it a little bit less.
This was existentialism at the level of Matrix or Sasha Gray.
The director really wants us to believe that in 2008 a secret organization of old people dressed in black leather that is obsessed with the Lingchi (or death by a thousands cuts) Chinese execution really exists? Or is it one of those "but it was all a dream... or was it?" movies?
Ok we get the Vietnamese little girl running naked on the street picture reference, we get the Lingchi reference, but why not make it
right?
When the old woman who lookes like a cheap version of M.me Blavatsky shows the book of the torture pictures (btw am I the only one who noticed the bad photoshop of the decapitated one?) she shows the famous Lingchi picture... and I think... how comes that such a powerfull image like this, that inspired Chen Chieh-Jen's beautiful short movie on the Lingchi executions and George Bataille's essay "Death by a thousands cuts" could also inspire this faux-lesbo, unrealistic, embarassing zombie torture porn movie?
I also found absolutely no purpose for the monster girl, if not to show off the extremely badly done special effects make up.
From imdb's user
george_brkly:
"Art (for people who have an airbrushed painting of a decapitated women in an bikini next to a Harley hung over their fireplace)">
Many commentators on IMDb have claimed this film to be some kind of 'art'. This of course is ridiculous. The philosophical background to the film, as previously pointed out by no-one, can be found with Bataille. He acquired some photographs of a young Chinese rebel who was executed for attempting to assassinate the Emperor. The photos were of the execution itself, which was the death by 1000 cuts. The agony of the ordeal causes the man's hair to stand on end and a look of - what Bataille took to be - a kind of ecstasy is seen on his face. Bataille would stare at his photos for hours on end looking for inspiration, thinking his mystical thoughts and plotting his rather bizarre pornographic novels. This was in the days when such images were hard to come by. If you'd like to see the pictures yourself, simply type "Bataille" into Google Images.
Bataille considered his greatest book to be the Tears of Eros, in which he looks at violence and eroticism in art from prehistoric cave paintings onwards. It is fully illustrated with pictures of cavemen sporting erections next to split open bison dangling their bloody entrails, woodcuts of unborn children bursting out of protestant martyrs wombs and through the flames and they burn alive at the stake, and so on.
Art is full of death, torture, suffering, eroticism, mysticism and so forth. In almost all cases the tortured and the dead are real people or based on real events. In films like Hostel, Saw, and now Martyrs the characters and events are artificial, the suffering being pornography and titillation not eroticism and art. We are not getting close to understanding the relationship between eroticism and death, or any other philosophical aspiration, nothing new or original is being raised by the film.
As pornography looks for boundaries to cross in order to satisfy its audience desire for sexual release, it turns increasingly to degradation. Viewers watch it to get off on the lack of humanity, and then get off a second time, afterwards, at their own lack of humanity. So-call 'horror porn' does the same. Film-makers look to make films that satisfy their audiences desire to see people degraded, tortured and killed so they can get off watching it and then get off feeling degraded themselves afterwards. But, as with the porn, viewers can take comfort in the fact that the scenes they watched were staged, the actors playing roles, and no-one really got hurt, just a little psychologically sore. It is little more than an emotional game. Not art but a game.
But now to the best part. The old woman refers to the victim in the Lingchi picture as "her". Well now, if they really wanted to impress anybody with some chinese torture references, they should have know that the MAN in the picure has been identified with Fu-zhu-li, a guard at the service of the Mongol prince head of the Aohan who murdered the prince and was sentenced to the Lingchi execution.
referenceWhat a nice faux pas, what a glorification of ignorance and pretentiousness.
The Blavatsky lookalike implies that the best vessels for martyrdom are young women, which seems true to me as I've endured massive amounts of torture watching this movie and lived to tell about it afterwards.