Random Thoughts

Fear Eats The Soul. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1973. ⚄

This is the only Fassbinder on the “best of” list, and it’s a movie I can’t recall seeing anybody mention before, so I’m excited.

Well, some things just aren’t believable here! Like the bartender not knowing how to pour beer! That’s a lot of foam, dude.

I always get Fassbinder mixed up with Herzog, but they’re nothing alike, of course. Fassbinder’s got heart.

This kinda reminds me of one of my favourite movies: Zuckerbaby by Percy Adlon. The plot has certain surface similarities, but there’s also something about how quiet the movies are… a certain stillness…

I love how Fassbinder plays the most disgusting character himself (the son-in-law).

It definitely has Three Part Structure Mania going on, where all the drama is happening in the third section (as usual). But it’s not the normal sort of thing… Fassbinder is kinda pointing out all the problematic bits in the first two parts, I think?

There’s a documentary about the guy who played the male protagonist. It turns out that Fassbinder was kind of a dick

Perhaps I should just sink the Midori, because not even the Melon Daiquiri #1 is particularly good:

On the other hand, the melon wasn’t very juicy.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

Hidden. Michael Haneke. 2005. ⚃

I talked about this movie here. It’s the best Haneke movie I’ve seen, so I’m not shocked it ended up on this list of movies. I had expected Amour to show up either on this list or the critics’ list, but I realise now that that movie was released after the list was compiled.

This is one of the very few post-2000 movies on the list.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

The Shining. Stanley Kubrick. 1980. ⚄

Yesterday I watched Salò, and I may have given the impression that it’s more interesting than it is. It isn’t interesting. There’s no reason to watch it; it’s just audience abuse.

So tonight (while waiting for the dinner to cook) I’m watching a much cosier movie.

I don’t think I’ve seen this since … like … I was fourteen? Or something? It was really scary back then.

Oh, Shelley Duvall! She was in all the movies back in the 70s, but I can’t recall seeing here in a while?

Oh, wow. That’s a … depressing career trajectory. She was in all the Altman movies (that’s where I remember her from) and an Allen and a Kubrick and Soderbergh and Campion… then nine crappy B-movies straight and then nothing. I wonder what happened.

Anyway!

I had forgotten how much of a 70s movie this is. I mean, when they show Nicholson’s and Duvall’s kitchen, it’s like a real, messy kitchen. And I didn’t remember how bad of an actor the kid is. (Oh, and the magical cook, too.)

[time passes]

This is proper scary.

Also I didn’t remember that Nicholson’s character was such an asshole to start with, even before he went insane.

[even more time passes]

OK, now I’m mostly bored, but periodically riveted. When this is exciting, it’s really exciting, but there are long swathes where there’s just wall-to-wall bad acting and nothing of interest happens. For a while I wondered whether Kubrick was just going for a stylised Brechtian thing, but, no, there’s just some really really bad actors in here.

Duvall is wonderful, and Nicholson is having so much fun chewing the scenery, but the rest are just… you know… TV quality actors. Sorry for the hate speech!

And:

Furries!

People at the time hated it:

It was the only one of Kubrick’s last nine films to receive no nominations at all from either the Oscars or Golden Globes, but was nominated for a pair of Razzie Awards, including Worst Director and Worst Actress (Duvall), in the first year that award was given.

More Midori in Illusion…

Perhaps I just don’t like Midori? Or Midori with pineapple is horrible?

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

The Seventh Seal. Ingmar Bergman. 1957. ⚅

I watched this movie two years ago, and it’s fabulous, of course.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Pier Paolo Pasolini. 1975. ⚁

Well, this isn’t a movie I’ve been looking forward to seeing… I’m so over the whole épatering la bourgeoisie thing.

Somewhat interestingly, the critics and the directors are really divergent on this one, only getting to the 202nd place in the critics’ poll. Gaspar Noé voted for it, of course.

Heh:

The film was rejected by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) in January 1976. It was first screened at the Old Compton Street cinema club in Soho, London in 1977, in an uncut form and without certification from BBFC secretary James Ferman; the premises were raided by the Metropolitan Police after a few days.

Anyway! This isn’t quite the film I was dreading: I thought it was just going to be nine hours of torture and rape, and it’s not that. It has a storyline (kinda), and, I mean, it’s got great performances from the actors and the cinematography is really good. I think you can squint and imagine this movie without, say, the fifteen (?) minutes of the most yucky bits, and this might almost have been an uncontroversial art house classic (“a trenchant treatise on Fascism” or something).

The final scene, where Pasolini implicates the audience, is just as sophomoric as you’d expect (and it’s all torture and rape). No wonder Haneke likes this movie.

I skipped past scenes that seemed they were going to be particularly icky. People who had to watch this in a cinema may perhaps not be as sanguine.

I’m continuing my quest to get rid of the melon liqueur: Envy.

It’s not very good. Perhaps the problem is the Frangelico…

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.