End Of The Week Shorts #95
A classical revisionist Western, Hang 'em High brings to the fore the questioning tendencies of films such as The Ox-Bow Incident to investigate the moral integrity of both the small, developing town and the young system of law implemented in a changing Old West. Still foundationally a Western, Hang 'em High exudes fundamentally American themes via its emphatic focus on the individual perspective. Simple at its heart, much like so many other Westerns, the individual and their sovereign body is presented as the only functional unit of moral decision. All else is too big to succeed; justice becomes spectacle, bureaucracy, crime, politics: the human heart imprisoned within the rib-cage.
Made to be a political document of sorts, Girlhood, or Band of Girls, maybe falls short in too many places. Perceived as a piece of narrative work of some degree of political consciousness, the moral and ethical ineptitudes of characterisation and plot become exploratory of something a little more human than ideological posturing. In such, Girlhood's themes of crime and naivety best translate through a frame psychological development. Essentially a story about confronting one's shadow, stepping into the underworld and emerging more whole, Girlhood questions the route a feminine body would tread as to individuate singularly - without classical romance essentially. This makes for an impactful and, above all else, rather unique film that emphasises the virtues of narrative deconstruction and reversal.
An operatic foray into an already highly familiar and conventionalised sub-genre of the Indonesian martial arts crime-thriller, The Night Comes For Us is music. Where the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey are like classical musical, Once Upon A Time In The West like Italian opera, The Lego Movie like contemporary pop, Rocky like 80s rock, The Night Comes For Us is low-grade heavy metal - dirty, grimy; shallow in pitch; disgusting in tone; relentlessly putrid and spectacular for just that.
Simply put, The Night Comes For Us is a storm of screams, gargles, guffaws, breaking bones and splattering, spewing blood. The is not technically perfect, but more than entertaining - a film you half want to watch, half want to watch others watch.
The cinema that has gathered itself around Iko Uwais has leaned towards an imperfect, in-the-dirt, punk form of the martial arts movie, but The Raid, his greatest effort, is so impossibly sleek and tight. Such cannot be over-emphasised.
The Raid seems to have been conceived by precise, computerised minds and performed by androids. The choreography shines in every detail, the camera is hyper-conscious, on the edge of intrusion but never crossing an aesthetic boundary and indulging excess. Upon my first watches, I could not grow to appreciate the first 40 minutes or so because of the gun play, but on this watch, the pin-point accuracy of it all blew me away. And then the physical combat - maybe the best action cinema has ever produced (I'd love to hear a better suggestion).
I have never vibed too well with Resnais. Like Antonioni, I find Resnais too cold, too dry, too presumptuous and too demanding. Alas, as with Antonioni, my first contact with the auteur was rather mystical. In such, as much as Blow-Up pulled me into its existentialism and postmodern malaise, so did Last Year At Marienbad suspend me in unknowing of a very conscious, meditative and emotional kind. Alas, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Je t'aime, Je t'aime and now Muriel were lost on me. Story and theme are lost between the frames of Muriel. I was put to sleep for about 10 minutes. What this is about can be read in critical essays, but I personally could not feel it. Whilst video/art installations and certain experimental cinemas can rely on artistic exposition, narrative film, in my belief, must speak for itself. Muriel appears dumb to me. Though, maybe I'm deaf.
Gabriel Iglesias' comedy is intentionally inconsequential. I have always felt this to be a defining factor of his stage presence and style, and so have never indulged him too much. Alas, once in a while, I can return to Fluffy's comedy and find a pleasant time. Not an incredible amount of laughs, maybe a little too much of the same voices and impressions, but I suppose that is what you sign up for. One Show Fits All works well enough.
Whilst this suffers ever so slightly from a try-too-hard kind of comedy and an attempt to breathe life into the much recycled and tested mode of the docu-drama (a sub-genre of an equally malleable and exhaustable nature - maybe paradoxically so, but an excess of reflexivity is tiring), Killing Gunther is rather funny.
The stacking of jokes through ridiculous characterisation is what makes this work so well. We are then dealt a band of uniquely absurd characters with nonsensical traits that come to interact in a manner that creates some burning moments of comedy. Being able to see this develop across a narrative is what makes this worthwhile, so go in without expectations of Schwarzenegger, and you'll have a blast.
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Ernest & Celestine - Simple Brilliance
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How It Ends - Limitations & False Cutesyness
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