1. Beau Travail: This was pretty good. Like, I was interested, but I’m still not totally sure what I was watching. Like, I mean, I understood the story, and the obsession with bodies and the weirdness of the homosocial group; but I feel like there was some secret that I wasn’t getting.
  2. Dark Habits: This is the IMDB plot summary for this film:
    Yolanda sings in a seedy nightclub. When her boyfriend dies of an overdose, she fears the police and seeks refuge in a convent that saves women from the streets. These off-beat nuns include a heroin using abbess who loves Yolanda, one who writes romance novels under a pseudonym, another raising a tiger in the convent yard, and one who designs fabulous fashions and is in love with the local priest. They plan an evening extravaganza starring Yolanda to celebrate the abbess’s birthday and to convince their wealthy patron not to abandon them.
    How could I not love it? Sacrilicious!
  3. Audition: Oh my god. I saw this having already seen Visitor Q and Ichi The Killer, both of which are just crazy fucked-up from the outset, so this was a little more…mellow. And by mellow, I mean agonizingly slow. Then you get all your fucked up all at once — I’ve been taking this horror movie class, and I’m at the point where I actually want movies that make me feel nauseous.
  4. Visitor Q: I had seen this before, but I felt like I should rewatch it because of this essay I’m writing; it was a lot easier to take the second time. It’s still a good, weird, kind of gross little film. It’s kind of the apex of the “suburbia is so crazy” genre, of which I am a fan.
  5. Straw Dogs: So, uh, this wasn’t a very happy movie. It was also pretty brilliant, even if it takes a pretty grim view of human nature. I’m really glad I read this essay right after I saw it. I didn’t agree 100% with his reading of everything, but this bit of historical context made a world of difference in how I was thinking about it:
    One might do best by calling it a war movie; Straw Dogs is unthinkable without recourse to Vietnam. Made in 1971, little illusion left about the nature of America’s involvement in Southeast Asia, the movie invokes the conflict namelessly almost from the start. The campus troubles Amy and the “uncommitted” David have left behind can be nothing other than anti-war protests. War, Peckinpah would have you know, comes not only to avowed combatants, or protesters, but to the uncommitted; to those who meant to opt out. Of course, this is the great trope of Westerns as well, so often stocked with ex-sheriffs, army deserters, and gunslingers who’d meant to go straight before the plot caught up with them. Moving the story to the supposedly sedate and remote British countryside, to the current moment, changes nothing. You think you’re so modern, so civilized and assured, my American friend? You’ll find yourself a war before the sun rises.
    It was Sam Peckinpah’s first movie that wasn’t a Western, only I’m pretty sure it really, secretly, still is a Western.

Also, exactly no one has guessed any movies from my meme-quiz thing below. I just remembered why I don’t do this stuff.