Das Tagebuch Murnaus

The 101 movies Roger Ebert thinks someone should watch to become pop-culturally literate - not the best, but the most culturally resonant, I suppose. Ones I've seen marked with an asterisk:

( Read more... )

49 of 101, not bad I guess.

Tonight at the Cinecenta:

In the Realms of the Unreal
A documentary about Henry Darger, outsider artist who worked as a janitor in a Chicago hospital for years but left behind a profusely illustrated 15,000 page book.

http://www.alternet.org/movies/21374/

I'm going. You coming?

A moderately interesting weekend, though not enough sleep.

Friday night Betty and I went to the Village. I found a black jacket and three neat videos:

The Bat with Vincent Price, coolest guy in the world, and Agnes Moorehead
The Fall of the House of Usher, even more Vincent Price (coolest guy in the world) and
The Satanic Rites of Dracula Christopher Lee as the head bloodsucker trying to work out a strain of bubonic plague that will off everyone in 1972 swinging London, Peter Cushing is trying to stop him.

After a slice we went to see The Fog of War, I highly recommend it. Good history. McNamara is allowed to say his piece, and while Errol Morris does his best to counter what he's saying with carefully selected images of horror and suffering and his occasional strident questions, (uttered off-camera in this something-pinched-inside voice that reminded me of an upset Preston Manning) I still came away thinking it was pretty balanced.

Saturday my Mom came over and we went out to get some topsoil and doughnuts. Fixed up the side bed where I've planted the strawberries and the front bed where I planted this year's first batch of poppies. It was a sunny windy day so Aki and I went to the school yard to fly a kite. First time he'd ever flown a kite - I hadn't flown one since I was his age! It was lots of fun and he was delighted with it.

Saturday night was movie night - I got a bunch of videos from Pic-a-Flic and we saw:

Tales of Terror with Vincent Price, (did I mention hw was the coolest guy in the world?). A-and Peter Lorre as a drunk!
The Omega Man with Charlton Heston, it wasn't as good as I remembered it, too early-70s by half. Could have been some great satire there, but no.
Island of Lost Souls Not bad! "Are we not men?"
Suspiria Icky-violent, not nearly as scary as I'd been led to believe. But I was quite tired and kept dozing off. Sent Aki to bed after the first murder.
Lair of the White Worm Ditto for this, found Hugh Grant kind of distracting. But Amanda Donohue was all right, esp. with her hirsute axillae.
A Walk in the Sun Not a bad war film, marred by the infrequent "ballads" wedged into the film by a voiceover baritone, like turds poked into the top of an otherwise agreeable cheesecake.
The Red Badge of Courage with Audie Murphy - a good adaptation of the book; Aki had really enjoyed the book when we read it and liked the film.

Sunday I mowed the lawns and as much of the garden as I could reach. I like mowing the garden, the spinach and garlic that's overwintered makes that corner of the yard smell like an enormous Caesar salad when I cut it. Sunday night we played Vinci, not a bad game that takes a bit of planning and is over before it goes on too long. Also taught Aki to play Attila, haven't quite figured that one out yet.

***
( Warning: Vote call raises terror risk )
What a pity this excuse can't be trotted out as one to cancel the American elections "for the duration of the present emergency", thus installing Shrub as Maximum Leader for Life. But I'm sure they've looked into it....

Well, it was an OK weekend, even if I did not get a lot accomplished. ( Read more... )

Well, a weekend spent resting, for once. Or mostly resting.

Friday night was Gothvic coffee night, so windy and cold that we all moved inside when it got dark. Kiri_bean's friend Manjari was in town, and a few other people came out of the woodwork. Scuttle was there before going to work, and now she's home dying of some awful biological thing, seaofrain was in Vancouver organizing her Elegant Gothic Lolita tea party, and that's all the Gothvic/Livejournal people I can reference for now.

Saturday we went grocery shopping and I deked out to the Salvation Army up the hill from the mall. I found a book of Varga pinup girls in good shape (the book was good too, only a few dog-ears) and a strange French-language {{metiers de loto}} bingo style game for 99 cents. It came with six cards with six pictures of people dressed in their work clothes but with empty hands, and 36 little cards showing various implements. So players had to match up the typewriter with the typist, or the {{machine a ecrire}} with {{la dactylo}} or something like that (sorry if I get the genders wrong, I wasn't paying attention). It was a pretty old set, because there were cards for gas jockeys in peaked caps, sculptors, manual typists and so forth. Funny too, because some of the implements were out of scale so the nurse was threatening her patient with a syringe the size of a bicycle pump! I suppose these days you could work a few changes on it, too - try to argue that {{le facteur}} (the postman) needs a cleaver to do his job correctly, and the butcher needs the syringe to dope up the meat so it has a taste, etc. and so forth.

Then I mowed the lawns (actually, these days it's more like chopping the dandelions off short, as the grass has stopped growing until the fall) and we set up the new used tent in the backyard. I am planning on taking that one to Burning Man and wanted to test it out for leaks and tears and how quickly one could set it up in a wind. It's a fine little bit of shelter, but it's definitely not for two adults unless they are Siamese twins. New sleeping bag and sleeping pad are fine too.

Sunday I hacked around weeding the garden, picking cherries off the tree (they are good this year, and the birds didn't get near as many as they usually do), going for a long bike ride in search of a stamp, and watching an anime I had found last week: "Wings of Honneamise". There is so much imagination in this movie: the people who made the story of the beginnings of space flight on another world stocked this alternate Earth with believable alternate technologies, religions, styles of dress, etc.. Really must have been a labour of love.

And this morning woke up late for work already - SOMEONE had reset the alarms we use to get up at 7:15. One was set for 6:00 am and one for 7:20 pm. I love having twelve whole minutes to do all the bathroom business, shave, dress, grab food, pack bag and rocket out the house with my boots on the wrong feet (OK, so that last bit was exaggeration but you get the idea). So now here I am, updating this journal!

One of my bad habits is to stay up really late on Friday and Saturday nights, watching videos that are too tedious to explain to my youngster. This weekend I watched a movie I had picked up entitled "Female Perversions".

No, it was not a porno film - I had actually picked it up by mistake since what I wanted to watch was another film called "Female Misbehaviour", a film directed by Monika Treut that is a series of four short documentary films about the fringes of femininity - sections with Camille Paglia, Annie Sprinkle, a butch woman into SM, and a female-to-male sex change subject. For some reason I did not remember the film title correctly.

The plot of the film involves Eve, a neurotic bisexual uptight lawyer, and her upcoming appointment as a judge. Her preparation for her interview with the state governor (who will make the decision about her judgeship) is interrupted by her sister Maddy, who is about to defend her PhD thesis. Maddy is a kleptomaniac and gets caught, so Eve has to tool out into the desert town where Maddy lives and get her out of jail. While there, she meets Maddy's female roommate, the roommate's daughter and some other woman who blows in from somewhere - it wasn't clear to me who she was related to. In the end, Eve gets her judgeship, Maddy gets out of jail and wins her PhD, the two of them have a climactic psychodrama scene where they recall that their father abused their mother, and Maddy's roommate goes on a date with a guy. As Eve is leaving to go back to the big city, she finds the roommate's daughter burying her menstrual pad under a tree, as she does every month, since it's a baby that was never born. She also finds that the daughter has carved the word "LOVE" into her leg with a razor blade "because I couldn't carve the word HATE into my bones". End of film.

Now that I think about it, perhaps this film could be called a form of pornography.

Porn has been described as depictions of sex without any form of emotional attachment or eroticism; without debating the pros or cons of that, it's still clear that porn presents an idealized version of sex without repercussions - practised on, with or by idealized people who use other idealized people as sex objects. In short, a sort of fantasy of human relations stripped down to only the basic aspect of rutting behaviour.

This film is also a gender-based fantasy, with two points to make:

1. MEN BAD.
Every male character in the film is some kind of caricature. Eve's father is a distant and unstable emotional abuser who doesn't want to hear about her good news about the judgeship because she called in the middle of the night to tell him. Eve's boyfriend is a hyper-rich engineer or architect (it's never made clear) who acts like a sex-obsessed, selfish little boy. Maddy's roommate gets all worked up about going on a date with someone and comes back in tears - again, it's never made clear how he upset or disappointed her, but he did something. In the interview with the state governor, Eve comes off thinking she blew it because she told him the truth about being single - "oh, why didn't I say I was engaged or something?" after the governor blathers on about how important his five daughters are to him.

During the film, Eve has these dream sequences where she imagines that the men she faces off against in the courtroom (in the film's only courtroom sequence, she is the only woman) are staring down her blouse or peeking at her legs while she goes on and on about how the defendant only understands "dominance" and therefore must have all his property seized. The defendant shows up later in two fantasy scenes, one while she is alone in her office and another while using a pay phone, grabbing her from behind, twisting her head around and whispering her insecurities into her ear (about her flabby butt, flat breasts, she's a fraud and everyone will find out, etc.)

2. WOMEN GOOD.
In contrast, whatever women do, especially without men, is a Good Thing. Eve is bisexual and has a hot affair with the curvy blonde psychiatrist who just moved into the office down the hall. Maddy's thesis is in Anthropology, on a village in Mexico that is some kind of ideal matriarchy. Maddy is a kleptomaniac but usually throws the stuff she steals into the trash outside the store; her justification for theft is that it gets her off sexually. The Unknown Woman talks dirty and gyrates around in her underwear while the other women drink wine and complain about men, so Maddy's roommate doesn't feel so bad about her bum date any more. When the credits roll, we see that the film was made almost entirely by women (except for a few technical and editing positions).

There is also a recurring fantasy or dream sequence where Eve is walking a tightrope - sometimes the end of the rope is held by an abstract male character in robes and a white mask, sometimes it is held by a naked fat old woman covered in mud who I guess represents her fear of old age, and sometimes it is held by the roommate's daughter, who is sawing away at the rope with a razor blade the size of a hardback book. I'm not sure whether this sequence relates more to 1. or 2. above, but the symbolism is appallingly crude.

I found this film alternately boring and off-putting, for the same reasons that I find explicitly pornographic films boring and off-putting. Films like this are repetitive, uninteresting, crude, simplistic, and not far enough removed from reality to make an interesting story. The characters are flatter than cardboard and are inherently uninteresting and unlikable.

At the bottom of it all, this film and any porn film you could name both have the same basic disdain for humanity - neither film is interested in showing respect or even acknowledgement of the complexity of human beings and how they relate to each other, or why they do what they do.

I should have just gone to bed. But I felt compelled to watch this thing to the end (and it seemed to go on forever) and analyze why I didn't like it. And now I'm wasting bandwidth and even more time telling you about it!

Next time I'll watch "24 Hour Party People" again - at least it's funny and has a great soundtrack.