by ·Comments Off on My Son John (1952, Leo McCarey)

Annoyingly square 1950s movie with a worm of weirdness in the middle. Mostly it’s clumsily-made propaganda, but the dialogue pops at times, and EGOT Helen Hayes is very good, bringing real personality to a bland mother role. Movie feels like a play, with long takes (ruined with weird edits via optical zoom), the family naturalistically stuttering over their lines. You wouldn’t think it’s the work of a 30-year veteran director, but at least it’s lovably eccentric – you also wouldn’t guess this all-talk bible-vs-communism story would end in a car chase and shootout.

Dad vs. Red John:

Mom listens in:

Mom has nothing to talk about except when her kids were little, which seems familiar. John (Robert Walker, department store worker in One Touch of Venus) is doing important work in Washington while the other two songs (one from a John Carpenter movie, the other from a movie John Carpenter remade) head off to war. Dad (sheriff of Forty Guns) is exasperating, decides John is a commie then whacks him with a bible and pushes him over a table. Nobody in this movie can take a joke – that’s the root of the problem.

John really is a commie though, and FBI agent Van Heflin (a major player on the cowboy scene in 3:10 to Yuma) is hanging around the house, dancing around what exact degree of treason the kid is being charged with. After John doesn’t survive the car chase, movie peters out with his pre-taped speech warning the youth about soviet infiltration.

Mom vs. the FBI:

Cowboy Dan reviews the rushes:

My second movie in consecutive weeks where someone calls a person “whozis.” Will Sloan: “Contains some nice Game of Death-style trickery to conceal the fact that the titular Son John died during production.” Rosenbaum: “At once profound about the dynamics of family discord involving cultural differences and deranged about the Communist menace.” Kehr: “An appalling masterpiece. Resist the temptation to laugh at the film’s violent anticommunism and try to see it as the audiences of 1952 did, and you’ll experience the most wrenching right-wing film ever made.”

by ·Comments Off on Hawks and Sparrows (1966, Pier Paolo Pasolini)

The rare movie with a bird title that is not a metaphor, two guys (long-faced comedian Toto and the curly-haired young guy from every Pasolini movie, both of them very good) are sent by St. Francis to spread the good word to the hawks and the sparrows. They spend a year in a field until Toto learns to talk to hawks and tell them about god. Stalking sparrows in a churchyard, Toto attracts a following, getting overrun with townspeople building a festival around him, finally begs forgiveness then rampages through the place, pelting nuns with ricotta. When they see a hawk eat a sparrow, they inform St. Francis and he tells them to start over. Back in the present-day framing story, I don’t like how the film crew keeps pulling the talking communist crow by a string. Not sure if the plot disintegrated in the last third or if I’d had too many beers, but Toto gets as tired of the dubbed crow as I did, and eats it.

It’s not a serious movie:

St. Francis, also of Rossellini’s Cartesius:

Philosophy:

by ·Comments Off on Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (1975, Rainer Fassbinder)

Mother K receives a bit of bad news: her husband went to work and murderer-suicided his boss. She gathers the family (son Ernst and his wife Irm Hermann, dancer daughter Corinna), and their situation attracts reporter Jorg and a communist couple. Everyone involved exploits the tragedy in their own way, also a sharp movie about political fractures within families.

L-R: Mother K, son, Irm, bearer of bad news

Communists:

Mom is the lead from Fear Eats the Soul in another big role. Ernst (star of Fear of Fear the same year) and wife Irm Hermann get the hell out of there and return pregnant. Mom’s daughter Ingrid Caven (a Year with 13 Moons star and a Suspiria Remake teacher) shacks up with the reporter (the large-faced star of Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day) and finds a job in town playing off her family’s infamy. After the daughter leaves, mom calls up communists Peeping Tom and Petra von Kant, who were the last people to be nice to her, but she wants real action while they say things like “it’s a slow process / we can’t work miracles / we won’t forget you.” Falling in with increasingly radical groups, Mother K meets anarchist Horst (Matthias Fuchs of Decoder) whose plan is to bring guns to the newspaper and demand a retraction of the reporter’s sensationalist article. We get a couple of possible ways out of this: a bloody shootout via intertitle, then a happy fantasy where Mother K survives, is abandoned by everyone again, and meets a nice lonely man.

dancer, reporter:

by ·Comments Off on Everything Everywhere Again Alive (1975, Keith Lock)

Color fields, electro-tones, patterned text onscreen, with the main camera action being Canadian farmers. A barn raising is interrupted by color fields. A pig is killed, but then, pigs are portrayed as horrible disgusting creatures (I thought the one playing with the dogs was cute). It’s an ambitious title for an experimental re-edit of your home movies from some months at the cabin, but I’m not mad that I spent the time watching this, and at least it will always be filed alphabetically next to an oscar winner.

Joshua Minsoo Kim in Cinema Scope:

At various moments throughout the film we hear minimal, humming synth tones, which were added because Lock felt he heard such sounds coming from the images themselves … It’s an elegant manoeuvre that is matched by another interesting strategy: graphics (shapes, numbers, a circuit diagram) are overlaid atop images. Formally, these feel in line with works by other Canadian filmmakers like Joyce Wieland and R. Bruce Elder, and they call attention to the surface of the film plane, as if inviting us to view everything as a spectacle behind glass.

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 15: The Spanish Earth (1937, Joris Ivens)

Unfortunately they still haven’t invented commie propaganda films that aren’t boring, but in the early scenes Joris pulls out some terrific images of the farmland before it goes into newsreel-like war scenes. What does lboxd mean by “The film would have been seen by those making it as a documentary.”

The soldiers and the farmers working for the same cause, driving back and destroying fascism. Nice story – of course this outcome brought decades of prosperity and creativity, which is why Spanish cinema was so dominant in Europe throughout the mid-century. The music is pretty decent, and halfway through I realized there were two narration tracks and switched from Hemingway to Welles.

by ·Comments Off on One, Two, Three (1961, Billy Wilder)

Cagney is a Serious Fast Talking Businessman who yells all his lines in Cold War Germany. He’s a Coca Cola executive (which means a lotta references to Atlanta), pitting pop culture and business against commie mentality. The German language jokes are sharp and funny, from former Berliner Wilder. Oscar nominated b&w cinematography by Daniel Fapp, who shot color oscar winner West Side Story the same year. The jokes and politics are good, as is most of the farce stuff, but Cagney is a disaster.

The daughter is with beau Horst Buchholz, just off The Magnificent Seven:

“You want the papers in triplicate or the blonde in triplicate?”
“See what you can do.”

Sexy secretary Ingeborg was in Rivette’s The Nun, the boss’s Southern party-girl daughter was in the following year’s State Fair, and her dad had been in Shockproof. The boss isn’t doing a Southern accent, exactly, but I like that all you can see out the window of his Atlanta office is parking lots. References to Omaha, La Dolce Vita, and Playboy.

Atlanta:

Commies:

by ·Comments Off on Her Socialist Smile (2020, John Gianvito)

After Profit Motive, Gianvito made a couple of 4+ hour docs about the messes that US military bases leave behind in other countries, but here he’s back in Profit Motive mode with a compact doc full of reading material. The subject is Helen Keller, so he plays with narration and silence, also mixes in period sound recordings and tactile nature photography. A dead bird is photographed for metaphorical reasons, and I’m still recovering from all the avian violence in Bird Island but I’m going to allow it.

Keller was turned onto socialism by an HG Wells book, and after socialist party infighting, she joins the IWW/wobblies and becomes increasingly radical – but remains philosophical and witty in her Q&A responses.

by ·Comments Off on Dope is Death (2020, Mia Donovan)

Portrait of a NYC clinic that sticks pins in your ears to treat stress and addiction. Through interview and archive footage it delves into the history of how Black Panthers and other associated groups studied Chinese acupuncture and brought it back to help their community, then keeps returning from the archives to the present-day clinic and its patients. The founding leader was Mutulu Shakur (below) – I’m behind on the ol’ blog, no surprise, and now we’re watching the new Adam Curtis movie, following the story of Afeni Shakur, so really covering Tupac’s roots this year. The fatal armed car robbery that gets Mutulu imprisoned for life came out of nowhere in this story, and it’s not interested in explaining much about acupuncture itself, more of a history lesson and community portrait.

by ·Comments Off on La Chinoise (1967, Jean-Luc Godard)

Catching up… I watched this three weeks ago, and the only note I took says:

Unfun intellectual/political word games

Obviously it’s a complicated (if unfun) movie, so a one-line review will not do. This is where my lack of biographical knowledge on Godard (and lack of interest in 1960’s politics) holds me back, because this feels like an escalation of ideas about consumerism and radicalism and societal ills from 2 or 3 Things and Weekend… but it also feels like a parody, its characters deluded comic-book Mao radicals. This doesn’t seem right, since the ideals of our main characters seem similar to Godard’s own, in his later, more boring works.

Feels like we spend forever in the primary-color apartment with young commies Jean-Pierre Leaud, Juliet Berto (her first year in film) and Anne Wiazemsky (star of Au Hasard Balthazar the year before). But there’s also an assassination attempt, a guy exiled from the group, suicide, some fun self-reflexivity, and an endless train conversation with a philosophy professor. Literature references abound, apparently, and name-dropping of Katy’s favorite theorists.

Played Venice the year Belle de Jour won, tying China is Near for a jury prize.