'The Woman In The Dunes'

I tried to find a still from one of the tremendous close ups this film had. I found these significant because it's about a school teacher who gets caught up living in this set inside a dune pit, where sand works itself into every nook and cranny of their bodies, clothes and lives.

Some of the shots really showcase the bodies -- often naked, because sand in your clothes is the worst -- encased in this sand. This is the best photo I could find.

Anyway, in his review of the film, critic Roger Ebert compared it to the myth of Sisyphus, who is damned to roll a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down. And he must do this for enternity.

I would agree only if part of the story was that Sisyphus had a tiny rock in his shoe the entire time. The sand in this film makes you want to shower afterwards.

'Marketa Lazarová'

All I could think about while watching this Czech film set during the ruthless and unforgiving Middle Ages is how North America never had a time like this. Also, how has that shaped the United States.

Sub-sub-question, is it possible that right now is the United States' Middle Ages and we've simply swapped out savage violence … well, for savage violence (that by gangs in Chicago or teenagers on video game consoles).

Are there ages any more? Ages always recorded some advancement in culture. Point being, is the United States in one age and will that transition to a new age where things are better, where science and understanding rule? Or, are we beyond ages? As things evolve they also tend to devolve in a lot of ways.

There is no real history of North America in the Middle Ages. The Europeans hadn't come over yet except for some Vikings. Otherwise, the indigenous peoples that traveled over the Bering land bridge centuries inhabited the free land. It would take several lifetimes for anyone of a  different skin tone to set foot on the continent and begin to really screw shit up.

There were North Americans during the Middle Ages, but it takes fragments of pottery and weapons to really understand a fragment of their culture. We don't know their lives quite like we know that of the Europeans. Chances are, the lives of the North Americans during the Middle Ages probably wasn't too drastically different than those centuries before or centuries after.

Let's hope that the worst of the Middle Ages is Facebook.
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'Les Vampires'

A 10-part series of episodes that runs just under seven hours total. It's a messy confluence and often hard to watch. I often found the action confusing, I mixed up characters jumping from episode to episode and it was a very complex plot for it being 1915.

I kept thinking, however, that all these people are dead. And that depressed me. Even the little boy, Eustache Mazamette. René Poyen played the boy and he was seven when he did Les Vampires. He was out of the film business when he was 24 and he died at 59. 

But he made his name as Poyen appeared in dozens of short films before doing Les Vampires starting at age four. 

The most interesting plot point of Les Vampires is that it's not about the mythical, blood-sucking immortal demons, but instead an Apache gang, which I had no idea about. These were violent roving packs of gangs that terrorized members of the middle and upper class in Paris during the early part of the 20th century. 

They were known for their violence and for using an "Apache revolver," which was a third knife, a third revolver and a third brass knuckles. 

'Peking Opera Blues'

An odd film because it's pretty foreign-film wacky with all sorts of Chinese tomfoolery, which probably  drew a billion laughs back in 1986 from repressed young Chinese kids. Then, suddenly it turns into this very bloody, dark shoot-em-out action movie.

they hold nothing back. They have a girl getting whipped nearly to death and strapped to a bed, we assume, to be raped by a general. She is saved when a friend acts to seduce the general to create a means of murdering him, which she does and the two girls pull a "Weekend at Bernies" in order to appease the guards.

The only real interesting part of the film is the kabuki actors in the ornate face paint screaming into the camera.

'A Man Escaped' & 'The Hole'

Because you can't have enough French prison-escape movies. Although not connected in the least, both  have a lot of common threads outside of being tremendous films.

A Man Escaped was about a French Resistance fighter caught by the Nazis during World War II and imprisoned in Fort Montluc. The film was based on the memoirs of Andre Devigny, who basically lived everything in the film including the escape from Montluc.

Director Jacques Becker also was imprisoned by the Nazis due to his activism in film after serving as an assistant to Jean Renoir. 

After the war, his own film career started and in 1960, four years after A Man Escaped, he released The Hole, which was based on Jose Giovanni's book, which featured Jean Keraudy, who was cast to portray Roland in the film (he also introduces the film after being shown working on a car. 


The Hole is far superior, I think. Mostly due to the excellent performances from the small main cast of five guys, who basically had zero acting experiences. For the most part, The Hole was each of their first performances. 

Becker died just weeks after the conclusion of filming. 

'Ikiru'

As someone haunted and often terrified of death, my mortality and general existence as I internally grapple with the mysteries of meaning, a film like Ikiru, or To Live, strikes at my very core. I don’t know if it soothes my inner demons, but it helps knowing that it’s a universal rock in the shoe. 

Watanabe is a mid-aged mid-management bureaucrat in “public affairs” – a position where he hears the complaints of the public only to marginalize their problem or pawn it off on another group.

He lives with his son and daughter-in-law, both ugly and unforgiving as they care more for their father’s death and subsequent inheritance than they do anything else.

After learning he has stomach cancer and a few months to live, he searches for meaning or perhaps a quick fix to the anxiety that he’s wasted his life, including an understated fear that he somehow caused some sort of ruin upon his son, no thanks to the early death of Watanabe’s wife.

Watanabe seeks solace. He ventures into the wild underbelly of earthly pleasures such as a striptease and club. He partners with a young female co-worker in searching for the secret of happiness. It’s not until he learns that the most immediate impact can be made in his existing job where he works tirelessly (sorta) in having a park created in a blighted part of town.

The final quarter of the film are his co-workers at his wake, getting drunk and putting together the pieces as to Watanabe’s change in attitude the last five months.

It’s as poignant of film as you’ll find. No explosions, unfortunately. But there is a swing.

'The Ear'

Filmed in 1970, The Ear did not receive a major release until 1989 after Soviet-rule in the Czech Republic ended and certain avenues for artistic expression were laxed. 

The Ear is often compared to the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton white-knuckle ride, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Appropriately so considering both place unhappy couples in (often) stressful or terrifying situations (exacerbated by alcoholic females) that bring to the surface all of the pockmarks of their respective relationships as they teeter on out and out destruction.

The Ear follows a couple returning from a political/work party only to find that their house had been bugged by the Communists. The paranoia behind what’s been said and when drives the couple to lash out at each other only to sorta find each other again once on the brink of destruction and madness.

This is a tremendous film.

'The Decalogue' & 'The Double Life of Veronique'

A set of 10 short films originally produced for Polish TV. Each is loosely set around one of the 10 Commandments from the Old Testament.

Extraordinary for TV, the series was hailed as the only masterpiece by Stanley Kubrick in his lifetime. Although very good, I don't know if I can go that far, but Kubrick would know much more than I would.

Two of the films -- Nos. 5 and 6 -- were later expanded into full-length features. Eight of the 10 feature actor Artur Barciś  playing an unnamed role. The theory is that he supposed to be some supernatural character keeping tabs on the Earth-dwellers and their moral dilemmas. Also, have feature milk in some part of the plot. I don't know what that means other than a reference to the "land of milk and honey," which the Jews of the Old Testament were seeking with Moses and Abraham.

The Double Life of Veronique and The Decalogue were both directed by the great Polish director Krzysztof KieślowskiThe Double Life of Veronique. I don't honestly remember much of it. I'm sure I was seriously impressed at the time.

'Sátántangó'

Seven hours later and I have conquered the "Satan's tango," or as the title translates to English.

It's a complex and insanely slow film ... or epic. Or gale of hot air. It's in black and white with very little dialogue and a ton of long takes. If you don't watch closely you miss a whole lot. And I missed a whole lot. But, hell, there's seven hours of film here. You make up for it with pure quantity.

As excruciating as this film was to watch, the most tense moment is when the girl, who later kills herself, is groping and harassing the cat and then later poisons the animal.

Otherwise, it's a real pick-me-up. 

'The Saragossa Manuscript'

I don't have a lot to say about this movie outside of the fact that it's extremely bizarre and and extremely long.

Running 182 minutes for a plot that wanders and skips to and fro is not an easy passage of time. It takes work and a certain dedication.

It entails a soldier during the Napoleonic Wars finding a book, the Saragossa Manuscript, that details the doings of his grandfather, also a soldier. While the film works as a sort of flashback to his grandfather's time, it also includes our hero interacting with a series of eccentric and odd characters from a sort of shaman to two Moorish princesses, who claim to be cousins and who also seduce him.

Or so we think. Whilst it is intimated that these people and scenes are real, the soldier regularly winds up waking up beneath some gallows.

I thought the movie would end with everyone realizing that the soldier is indeed dead, which might be the "truth" or the movie reality. And the people he encounters during the present are just ghosts or perhaps those helping the soul reach peace.

'Cairo Station'

Youseff Chahine is one of the great directors of the world and probably the most renown from Egypt's less-than-stellar past as a filmmaking giant despite the innate intrigue surrounding the country's history.

Who could better make the story of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra than an Egyptian? Although, I'm sure there'd be a ton of bias. Who could better make a story of the Pyramids, the great pharaohs and the countless wars and one of the great early civilizations?

Chahine admittedly made films for himself even wanting international audiences more so than his homeland Egyptian audiences. Still, this might be because his films are genuinely Egyptian. Who else would you want to see your homeland -- its streets, rail stations and ordinary people -- than those on the outside looking in?

Chahine actually portrays the hero-villian in Cairo Station, the easily pitiful Qinawi, a beggar in a Cairo rail station, who gets a job selling newspapers. His sexual frustration is pasted onto a wall of his room where he's placed photos of pin-up girls. This desire is quickly focused on a soft-drink saleswoman, Hannuma, portrayed by the super-sexy Hind Rostom. 

In typical fashion, instead of buying flowers or attempting to woo her, he plans to kill him and stuff her in a crate on the eve of her marriage. He ends up killing the wrong girl and ... well, it doesn't end well for Qinawi. 

An interesting sub-plot is that of Hannuma's fiancé, a porter who is attempting to organize a union to strike. They spend just enough time on it to make it worthwhile, but generally it has little to do with the plot. 

Chahine did not shy away from controversial topics. He had gay and bisexual themes in his films and the brutal murder in Cairo Station certainly caught the eye of the government, who was not the friendliest or most progressive for filmmakers. Chahine once exiled himself to Lebanon to make two films in a sort of protest. 

'A Touch Of Zen'

I have a feeling I've talked about wuxia. Do this thing long enough and you start to really not remember anything you done before. I spend more time searching for posts that I swore I've done than I do writing anymore.

A Touch of Zen is a Taiwanese film done in 1969 but released in 1971. In it's initial release it was split into two parts probably because it's 187 minutes long.

A Touch of Zen is an example of wuxia, which translates to "martial hero." It's a genre that has its roots in literature, but through the 20th century it's continued through video games, film, TV and comics.

The wuxia is not unlike the gunslinger of the American West or a knight of the Round Table. He's a hero with certain skills of survival like martial arts and fighting. Or swordsmanship in Arthur's England or the ability to shoot in a Gary Cooper Western.

More often than not, it's the wuxia's other skills that win the day. Patience, bravery, nerve, brains. Those are the qualities that really end up making the difference between the good guy or the bad guy winning.

In A Touch of Zen, our "martial hero" uses a bit of psychology to play on the superstitious tendencies of the enemy guards in order to gain victory. These warriors are noble. They fight for the right and the ethical. They carry the weight as if evil were always finding them somehow. As if life would be so much better if they'd be left alone. Probably, this is totally true.

'The Idiots' & 'Breaking The Waves'

The films are directed by Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier and are part of his “Golden Heart Trilogy” along with the previously reviewed Dancer in the Dark.

Both films are also part of the Dogme 95 genre, partially started by Von Trier in an attempt to make as natural of a film as possible: All shot on location, no artificial lighting, no soundtrack or score, no filters, no special effects and all in color. Basically, trying to make the film as much like actual life as possible. 

The Idiots was the first of these films for Lars Von Trier and depending on your definition of success, it was a relative failure. Both films had multiple infractions including sets, altering of light and the such. Doesn’t make the films bad, but it does sort of cheapen what those filmmakers were aiming to do. If your first movie can’t follow the rules, does it matter if the others can? Doesn’t seem any film has fit the Dogme 95 platitudes. 

The Idiots is about a group of young Danish men and women who go into public and act like mentally disabled (and physically disabled) individuals. Sort of ironically, they’re more anti-bourgeois group as much as they’re proponents for understanding and respecting the rights of the mentally and physically handicapped. They do it to waylay their inhibitions and to live freer. 

This film is notable (not only is it really, really good) for having unsimulated sex in a group sex scene, something brought on by Von Trier, but rarely duplicated. Due to the fact that it’s real people having real sex and folks can’t handle that. 

Breaking the Waves is about a religious woman – you sort of suspect that she’s extremely naïve or possible mentally handicapped – who marries a Norwegian oil rig worker and finds herself struggling with the time apart as he works in the middle of the ocean. After a brief respite at home, he returns to the rig and is paralyzed after an accident. 

After a failed suicide attempt, he urges his wife to take a lover. Maybe not so much for her as it’s for him in some sort of odd cuckolding fetish. She struggles with the request and eventually gets caught in this desire to be happy and the repercussions of being a harlot in a non-progressive religious community. 

Von Trier, in most of his movies, eventually puts the viewer no trial, so to speak. He challenges our beliefs in very raw, uncomfortable scenes. He places people in impossible situations that often fail and leave them has lost as they were before. 

'Romper Stomper'

Russell Crowe was 28 years old when Romper Stomper was released. It was just his fifth film and it would be another three years until he had a break out with his co-starring role in The Quick and the Dead and L.A. Confidential two years after that.  

He was still eight years from his true break out in Gladiator. 

Crowe looks younger in Romper Stomper, an Austrailian film about the decline of a rabble-rousing Neo-Nazi  gang in Melbourne as they terrorize the community and battle the growing number of Asian immigrants. 

Based on a real guy and allegedly inspiring an actual murder, the film is eerily like the film This is England including the punk influences, the Neo-Nazism, the charismatic lead man and the veritable fall from grace. It’s also a screenshot of the psychology of crime not unlike Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Except the gang on the latter killed and pillaged indiscriminately. I guess the Neo Nazis can be credited for having a mission statement. A fine line between sociopaths and cultish personalities. 

'Rosetta'

Rosetta is the triumph of the Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc. It is a sad story of a 17-year-old Rosetta who lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother, who's barely keeping anything together without the watchful eye of her oddly faithful daughter.

Rosetta has to hold the hand of her mother, deal with a fascist trailer park owner, catch fish in a local pond and attempt to keep a job despite her hot temper.

Emotionally complex, Rosetta's frustrations with joblessness, poverty and the idea that there will never be hope boil over and she joins the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism when she betrays a young man who had actually helped her early in the film.

Shortly after the film was released a law was passed to protect the rights of young workers like Rosetta. Although the law was already in the works before the film came out, it was called the "Rosetta Law" anyway.

The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes proving to be the pinnacle of their careers for the time being. The oddest factoid being that despite the success of the film in the 1990s and the subject matter dealing with young adults, the Dardenne brothers were into their 40s when Rosetta was made and released. 

'Three Brothers'

Three Brothers was a bit of a departure for director Francesco Rosi.

He was a central figure of Italy's post-neorealist genre, which tackled the problems in the years after World War II as Italy still tried to rebuild and the corruption that haunted the cities and governments. His films up until the release of Three Brothers in 1981, dealt mainly with political machinations, gangsters and intrigue.

Three Brothers, instead, deals with the death of the matriarch of the family as her three sons and her widower grieve and come to grips with their new lives. Meanwhile, they also deal with their personal lives that vary differently from the actual location (Rome, Turin, Naples) to what their lives are like (a judge presiding over a terrorist case, a religious youth counselor, a blue-collar worker attempting to keep his marriage together).

Each grieve in their own ways as they put together the pieces of how they feel about the death of their mother, each other and what they're going through on these respective islands.

'Chungking Express'

Directed by Wong Kar-wai, a member of the Hong Kong Second Wave, who was also responsible for Happy Together and In the Mood for Love.

Chungking Express was more of an escape for Kar-wai after filming Ashes of Time, a martial arts film that was delayed and extremely stressful. Chungking Express was a "light" project and it wound up being his most popular film.

Sorta getting over the Asian film thing. Although that's a pretty cool movie poster.

'Panther Panchali,' 'Aparajito' & 'Apur Sansar'

Most people sit in their little corner of the world and all around them people are doing things that are extraordinary and building these legacies.

Filmdom never ended moving west past Hollywood or east past New York City. Life continued and flourished in every corner of the world and insanely good things were happening.

In this little project, I've learned a lot, but most importantly I've learned about a lot of different people doing a lot of cool things like Satyajit Ray.

Every country has their own Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Martin Scorsese, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini and Luis Bunuel. India -- a country that battles more stigmas than most -- has Ray.

His crowning achievement was The Apu Trilogy -- a set of three films started when Ray was 34 years old in the 1950s. It is the prime example of Parallel Cinema, another term for India's New Wave, which put a premium on realism. The Apu Trilogy was made with an amateur cast for $3,000.

Not 60 years later, Danny Boyle would film Slumdog Millionaire for $15 million and win an Oscar with basically the same story as Ray's Apu.

'Winter Light'

One of the 900 Ingmar Bergman films on the list and this might be his best. It's rumored to be Bergman's favorite and also the second part in the so-called "Trilogy of Faith" from Bergman.

Considered highly biographical, it follows the spiritual crisis of a small-town priest, who is in clear distress over his own belief in God and the seemingly frivolity of life.

He is confronted by the school headmistress, and former lover, who has denied her own faith and sees and smells the internal struggle inside the priest. Soon, he counsels a local fisherman, himself undergoing a period of frustration and despair. At this point, the priest admits its own disbelief. After the he leaves, the fisherman commits suicide.

Despite all the cards laid out on the table, nothing changes. The priest remains without his former lover and the charade continues some more.

If nothing else -- granted, it's not an uplifting film -- it's a beautiful film, maybe Bergman's most gorgeous and that's saying a little something.

'Salò' & '120 Days Of Sodom'

Is it weird that neither the film nor book made me bat an eye?

This all should horrify me, but it doesn't and I think it's because it's so blatantly insane and over the top. Still, I'd never let my daughter or mom read the book or watch the film.

I also suspect I've been numbed by so much violence and sex over the years and it doesn't really matter. The only way to go is more graphic and more insane. And there's probably a tiny part of my brain that likes all of this.

The film is considered one of the most controversial films in history showing an unparalleled amount of sadism, nudity, graphic sexual encounters and the eating of feces. All of it happening to mere children.

Still, it's 1/20th of what the book recounts as the old prostitutes tell the gathering about their past exploits for 500 pages as it goes from highly illicit fornication, torture and eventually murder. The difference between the book and film is the level and total amount of adventures, but what the film lacks in quantity it makes up for the wicked nature and emotion from the four libertines as they almost revel in the final scene of hangings, tortures and scalpings.