End Of The Week Shorts #94
The first special of Sebastian's whose title doesn't ask a question - and it's pretty good.
Very understated, there are no huge bits - no real opener or closer; the separate bits merge into one, loose ends are all over the place; we're told a few stories - and they're very amusing. There aren't any huge laughs, but Sebastian's stage presence is simply great. The worst thing I could say is that the venue seems to be a bit too big and Sebastian's outfit a bit too tight. Beyond that, a good time.
Second watch: truly brilliant.
I can't help but love this as a subtle hero's story, one that presents us with a character arc just about away from the absolute depths of the pathetic and embarrassing. Truth hurts, but it doesn't go away: it stares you in the face. (Maybe that's why it hurts so much). Ostlund has such a succinct understanding of just this and manages to ever so minutely inject universal drama based on this principal into a modern setting with Force Majeure as to, in an indirect manner, explore the changing/unchanging roles men and women play in a relationship in the modern day. The result in ridiculously funny and unbelievably human.
On one level, this is alternative, independent, underground, experimental, art-house, niche cinema of the 90s to a grating, pull the hair on your arms out, scratch the back of your throat, degree. On another, Go Fish kind of works.
Tonally reminiscent of masterpieces (*irony*) such as She's Gotta Have It, Go Fish is rife with pretentious intellectual babble. This leaves the narrative bloated, but without the amateurish performances and meandering dialogue, this would be a short film about two lesbians meeting and then having sex. I don't think this does anything particularly special narrative, aesthetically or formally, but Go Fish certainly interrogates the mainstream rom-com and bends it for a lesbian audience. Maybe this makes the film praise-worthy, but, in my books, this is far from a must-see.
Fantastic. Everything about Django simply screams: iconic. I'd never heard about the film before, never seen clips or any images, but nonetheless, this feels like an event - something special.
Confining the Leone-esque epic-scale western seen in the likes of Once Upon A Time In The West into a narrative more the size of For A Fistful of Dollars, Django's melodrama is bombastic and unbelievably - almost ridiculously - stoic. The simple symbolism of the coffin and the cross strike across what you might call an inane narrative, uplifting a laconic shoot-em-up with the warm mythologising felt in classical westerns. The dubbing is an issue one simply lives with in the Spaghetti Western - but Leone does it better. That said Django is a truly brilliant movie up there with The Good... and Once Upon A Time In The West. Highly recommended.
A classic - through-and-through.
The western is long dead - at least its classical incarnation is - and it will never be again. Canyon Passage is a shot from the past that all at once showcases the importance of the western, narratively and culturally, and its more poisonous sentiments. In such, as audiences did and have, one has to surpass the strange moral athletics to come to support the settlers and empathise with their Indian-despising selves. Once this is asided, it's rather difficult to not fall into the melodramatic love triangle and the ethical struggles of our stoic hero. The simple silence and subtlety of the drama is Canyon Passage's greatest strength. For the way in which many plot strands are solved without attention and left loose and character-relations are almost mimed, I have to recommend this. More than sentimental, mythologising tosh, Canyon Passage is well worth the watch.
Le Corbeau is an enigma of sorts. Emergent from Nazi-controlled France, this simultaneously resents the truth as a small town's greatest troubles, yet also its only source of hope - in the end, a miserable saviour of sorts. The truth, in Le Corbeau, is beyond the grips of humans. And in such, this narrative presents itself as the inverse of that in Fritz Lang's M. Where M is about a mesh of lies and deceit, Le Corbeau is about an excess of truth. And where action in face of truth is M's central conflict, action precedes truth in Le Corbeau. The two films alongside one another reveal the impossible mechanisms of knowing, of seeking to discover and to cause without the interruption of something approximating fate.
Well constructed, though markedly dry, Le Corbeau is eerily inconclusive and utterly sceptical of simple humanity.
How curious it is that the Western immediately begins to struggle onto screen during cinema's inception via Edison's kinetoscope. With Bucking Broncho, a key element of the the genre's being is put onto film: its rodeo-esque spectacle. Here one begins to see implied the imperative influence the travelling vaudeville Western show and rodeo had one the cinematic Western. The display of foolhardy skill, of the beginnings of man's mastery of animals, all seem to symbolise a foundation of the American identity for Western filmmakers, writers, etc. Dickson and Heise screen this without ever knowing that, for the first half of the 20th century, the Western would be one of the most important forms of American cinema whose impact is still rather relevant and tangible today.
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