Moot Point

I feel like apologizing because I watched only four movies this week; though I did do a fair amount of reading, so that’s good. Also, years ago, four movies in a week would have seemed like an insane lot.

I do have a non-movie-related piece of advice. If you make drip coffee for convenience reasons, despite your knowledge that a French press produces a richer and more fully-flavoured cup, I would recommend ditching your paper filters and embracing the world of metal filters. You get all the delicious coffee oils and it doesn’t waste all that paper from regular filters. It’s almost as good as French press coffee.

1. Live Flesh (Pedro Almodóvar, 1997): Despite it working really well with all my arguments about late ’90s Almodóvar (his increasing political awareness shows a huge ambivalence about the absolute freedom celebrated in his earlier films) and the involvement of Javier Bardem (who you guys know I love), this remains not my favourite of his films. I realize the eventual redemption of the creepy stalker hero is kind of the point of the whole thing, but it’s not necessarily as fun to watch as the early comedies or as emotionally involving as something like All About My Mother.
2. Toto le Héros (Jaco Van Dormael, 1991): I’d seen this years ago, and I remembered liking it, but I didn’t really remember much else, especially not the way it maintains this unrelentingly cheerful tone in the face of a lot of really very dark content — your death, your incest, your really very sad delusional hero. It’s really good — the way they weave the different timelines together is really fantastic. Top points to the sex scene that’s intercut with fragmented close-ups of a corpse.
3. L’enfant (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2005): This movie’s really brilliant, but I don’t know that I actually enjoyed it. It’s really hard to sympathize with a protagonist who tries to sell his baby. Like, I realize that the point wasn’t necessarily for me to sympathize with him so much as watch the story unfold neorealistically. I loved all the scenes on buses; there is a lot of emphasizing transportation in this movie. I don’t have a snappy explanation for it, I just thought it had a nice rhythm.
4. Blood Wedding (Carlos Saura, 1981): This was lovely — it has a Jesus Christ Superstar-like opening with the cast putting on makeup and warming up — and then the whole thing is a flamenco ballet with the tragic love and this amazing slow motion sequence at the end. Not like, cinematically in slow motion; the dancers are actually dancing in slow motion. I found this, and Saura’s filming it, and me being aware of watching a performance that’s meant to mimic a cinematic affect that is itself filmed, really fascinating. On that theme, I would also mention the moment when the people at the wedding in the ballet “pose” for a photograph, and the music stops. Also, I am generally in favour of seeing stories told entirely through dance, especially tales of passion and forbidden love and so on. It really stands out starkly from other Spanish films I’ve seen from the transition period, being placed in this really hermetic world of performance, and not really dealing with the contemporary reality all that much. It’s an interesting contrast to someone like Eloy de la Iglesia or Almodóvar, for sure.

I got really sick for most of the week this week, which explains some of my choices. (And also why this is late! I’m still playing catch-up from all the work I didn’t do all week.)

1. Water (Deepa Mehta, 2005): This was just gorgeous. A melodramatic feminist love story set in 1930s India yay. I don’t have a lot to add, it’s gorgeous. The scene with the dancing with the colours was so lovely and such a clear way of expressing joy and freedom after spending the whole movie seeing the women in white for the whole thing.
2. Man Bites Dog (Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel & Benoît Poelvoorde, 1992): This is also pretty amazing. It’s a mockumentary following a film crew that’s making a movie about a serial killer. It starts out darkly comic and then gets…less funny. Everyone who’s talked it up to me has talked about how shocking it is, so maybe that’s what made it less actually shocking for me so much as confirming the dark side of the dark comedy. It’s pretty brilliant.
3. Red Dawn (John Milius, 1984): I know this is like the “young neocon formative movie,” but I can’t imagine liking it as anything but camp even AT THE TIME. The Soviet Union was already starting to collapse, and also, it’s just, like, Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey fight the communist invaders. Like I said, I was really sick this week and this was one of my sick movies. I was pretty much sitting there going “wow, explosions!” and “oh my god they’re going to shoot that guy!” so I guess it was pretty successful in that respect.
4. Jewel of the Nile (Lewis Teague, 1985): Oh wow. This is so high ’80s. It’s the slightly racist, action-packed, never-would-be-made-today sequel to Romancing the Stone. Reasons that this wouldn’t be made today: romantic action story about protagonists over 23; main action involves the rescue of a mullah who leads a group of Islamic terrorists (but it’s okay! he does wacky magic tricks! and is played by a guy named Avner Eisenberg so I’m guessing isn’t actually Islamic!); main couple has sex after seeing a “tribal” African dance that makes them realize how much they love each other; they actually have the scene where the villain leaves the heroes to die hanging over a pit but doesn’t watch them die; features Islamic terrorists named (according to IMDB) Barak, Tarak, Arak, Karak, and Sarak; also: Danny Devito.
5. Legally Blonde (Robert Luketic*, 2001): This is one of those movies that I know intellectually isn’t very good, but I can’t help but love completely whole-heartedly. Here is why: it is hugely feminist, as well as being funny and fizzy. Seriously, you start out with a blonde, hot girl that no one takes seriously and everyone thinks her going to law school is a huge joke and it turns out: she’s actually an awesome lawyer and her girliness turns out to be an asset in the courtroom (because of lots of law clients and law witnesses are women so knowledge of ladies is important).
6. Last Wedding (Bruce Sweeney, 2001): I’m not really sure what to say about this movie. It sets out to be a smart comedy about the pitfalls of actual adult relationships. And, it turns out to be a smart comedy about the pitfalls of adult relationships. I would definitely recommend it if only for the running joke about how the female lead is the worst country singer in the world.
7. American Gangster (Ridley Scott, 2007): This one was…okay. I wanted to like this way more than I did, because I like gangsters, blaxploitation (which was a pretty huge influence given that it was a movie about a powerful black gangster in late ’60s/early ’70s Harlem — also the inclusion of “Across 110th Street” on the soundtrack was an obvious nod), Denzel Washington, the 1970s, Josh Brolin, and the Jay-Z companion album. And like, the performances and the filmmaking were good, but i was very long. It’s two and a half hours long.

*First directorial credit: something called Titsiana Booberini. That makes me pretty happy.

I can’t even tell if various pop culture items are good or bad anymore. Examples:

• Brat Pack meets Cold War paranoia classic Red Dawn:
  -American Idol (Although I am pretty sure I irrationally hate David Archuleta now)
  -American Idol conspiracy theories
  -This Alan Parsons Project video:
  -Girlicious
  -The episode of Law & Order: SVU from the other night where after two murders have already been solved, Elliot Stabler’s pregnant wife gets Claire Kincaided, but then it’s okay! Because Jayne Mansfield’s daughter saves her! And then firemen pull her out with the jaws of life! And then she delivers the baby in the ambulance! But then it seems like she might die! But she doesn’t!

I’m hoping it’s just because I’m more receptive to televisual manipulation when I’m sick.

I wanted to watch more stuff this week, but I apparently didn’t have the energy.

1. Lilies (John Greyson, 1996): You guys I am so in love with this movie. It’s a movie of a play about the events surrounding a crime being performed in a prison chapel (by the prisoners, including a big black man as a female French aristocrat), but then there are also scenes that are set in the actual past (when the events happen) but that retain the actors. If that makes sense. It probably doesn’t. Anyway, it’s just a gorgeous movie: there’s all this interplay between performance and reality and there’s a gay love triangle melodrama at the centre of it. It’s like someone (John Greyson) took all my research interests and rolled them up into one fantastic movie. I’m definitely going to check out more of his stuff.
2. Crazy Love (Dominique Deruddere, 1987): This is an adaptation of several Charles Bukowski stories that are more or less about male desire and objectification of women, and it feels like it’s set in America, but it’s Belgian, so it’s in Flemish. I found it really hard to sympathize with a character as skeevy as the hero (who we see attempt to rape a sleeping woman and also…well, let’s just say “necrophilia” is one of the imdb plot keywords). It’s actually kind of poetic, that he can only love a dead woman, if you think of it from a feminist standpoint as a critique of masculinity, but you’re weirdly forced to feel sorry for him as well. So you know, it’s tricky. I loved the band at the dance, singing thickly accented, overly syrupy covers of American dance music.
3. Malpertuis (Harry Kümel, 1974 — the longer, Belgian release cut on the DVD, not the Cannes English dub, but I’m told the other isn’t bad): What a weird movie. You guys know me, you know how much I like movies that are kind of off-kilter, so when I say weird, I mean weird. It has Orson Welles (in full-on “Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now mode) as this giant dying patriarch in a giant bed in charge of this weirdly decaying and oddly hard to map house, and then he declares that his heirs all have to never leave the house in order to actually get the estate. The ending is the most amazing, disorienting thing ever: there are a bunch of different “explanations” all nested in each other, which don’t really wind up explaining anything.
4. Switching Channels (Ted Kotcheff, 1988): Oh man, I can just picture the pitch meeting:
   Ted Kotcheff: “Hey you guys I have a sweet idea for a movie. It’s a remake of His Girl Friday. With Kathleen Turner in the Rosalind Russell role and Burt Reynolds in the Cary Grant role! And make it about TV; a CNN-like network. In Chicago. During an election. It’s a can’t miss.”
   Producers: “A comedy about politics? Sounds risky. We can’t put up the whole budget on a project like that!”
   Kotcheff: “I know! But I have an idea! There’s this new thing I keep hearing about. It’s called ‘product placement.’ What happens is, we have Burt Reynolds drink a Jack & Coke, and then we get Jack Daniels and Coca-Cola to pay us for it!!”
   Producers: “Like the Reese’s Pieces in ET! That’s brilliant! Do you have any more such ‘ideas’?”
   Kotcheff: “Tons! I thought we could have the governor be an exercise fiend so that when he watches Turner’s touching interview with the wrongly convicted killer and decides maybe he should pardon him, someone will offer him some Gatorade! In a big bottle with a Gatorade logo!”
   Producers: “Of course. Everyone who identifies with the effete and totally inept governor will want to buy Gatorade!” Kotcheff: “But that’s not all? You know how in the original, the wrongly convicted killer hides in a roll-top desk?” Producers: “Not really, we don’t actually watch movies, you know.”
   Kotcheff: “Right, well anyway, to modernize it, we’re going to change the roll-top desk to a Canon photocopier. They’re desperate to make people not think of Xerox when they think copiers, because it’s 1988 and people still refer to copying something as ‘Xeroxing’ it. We’ll have the characters constantly discuss how their copier is so much better than a Xerox.”
   Producers: “Right, but make it a running joke so the audience won’t suspect they’re being advertised to.” Kotcheff: “Of course.” [Touches the side of nose.] “I’m a storyteller.”
   Producers: “Hey, do you know who’d be great for the Ralph Bellamy part?”
   Kotcheff: “I’m open to suggestions.”
   Producers: “Christopher Reeve! Superman! He’s desperate to show he has acting range and a sense of humour! But I’m sure that won’t show in the film.”
   Kotcheff: “No, of course not. Reeve has layers just like an onion.”
   This honestly wasn’t that bad, considering the desecration of a beloved classic. I actually really like Kathleen Turner and Burt Reynolds as a screen couple: the tough independent woman with the old-fashioned man’s man is a very winning combination. And unlike (the late) Christopher Reeve, he has great comic timing.
5. The Flower of My Secret (Pedro Almodovar, 1995): I’ve already written about this movie a few times. I wasn’t really looking forward to watching it again, but it did win me over with its splendid visual gorgeousness (it’s one of his best-shot films, in my opinion) and the performances of Chus Lampreave’s as the mother and Juan Echanove as Angel (both of which get better the more I watch them).Obviously Marisa Paredes is great as well; she’s just fabulous in general, so it doesn’t come as a shock when you see her run the gamut of emotions convincingly. The ending is still really slow, but the payoff is worth it.

So I’m kind of on a “healthy eating initiative in an attempt to effect weight loss,” which is to say I’m on what some people might call a “diet,” but I refuse to do because the whole “diet” concept is toxic and is generally linked to scary moralizing about food wherein eating more is “bad” and eating less is “good” and people’s weights somehow become indicators of their health or work ethic or moral fortitude or attractiveness or whatever, none of which I think is the case, intellectually.

Which is to say, I am on a diet, but I am somewhat ambivalent about it.

Because of my mistrust of diets, and the fact that I didn’t really eat that badly before, I am basically restricting my dietary efforts to eating less cheese, less bread and pasta, less sugar (though not much, because it’s physically impossible), and more vegetables and fish and vegetarian sources of protein (beans, nuts, tofu, etc.). Oh, and I am drinking more water. Ideally I will start doing more exercising at some point in the future, but I don’t want to be all “new regime!” about it because I am pretty sure that putting pressure on myself to make a whole bunch of lifestyle changes at once right now (while I am writing THE THESIS) is a bad idea and will result in me just giving up completely. Plus I am lazy.

My “diet” can be differentiated from a diet without quotes in that I am not actually weighing myself or counting calories and I value enjoying food more than I value getting my dress size back down to the single digits.

Basically what brought this about was talking to my mom, who’s lost a fair amount of weight in the last few years through healthy eating and running half marathons and stuff, and she talked about how she gained her weight gradually over the course of years. A little bit of weight every year doesn’t seem like a big deal, she said, but multiply it by ten. Given my family has a history of cholesterol problems and the fact that if I really just ate whatever I wanted, I would eat pizza for dinner four nights a week, guacamole on the fifth night, and butter chicken on the sixth and seventh, I decided I need to get this shit under control.

I haven’t really been on my “healthy eating initiative” long enough for there to be any effects at all, except that I am constantly thinking about food. That is for sure the worst part because I am finding it hard to gauge if I’m hungry or just thinking about what I should eat when I am.

This week was a good one for movie viewing, I managed to catch an amazing marathon of lady-centric pre-Code movies on TCM, accompanied by an original little talking head doc about the joys of pre-Production Code cinema featuring such lights as Camille Paglia (for whom I don’t have much use), Molly Haskell (who is all right by me), and professional commentarian Rudy Behlmer (about whom I don’t have much of an opinion at all).

It’s not that movies suddenly started being sexist when they brought the Hays Code in, they were plenty sexist before, but more that in general the movies were less moral, or in other words more fun. However much I enjoy them and the movie nerd in me is not at all disappointed to see stuff like this coming out of the archives, I wonder why TCM is pushing their DVD sets of pre-Code movies (aka before there were rules about the portrayal of sexuality), and I assume that it has at least something to do with their salaciousness. The sexual content isn’t particularly shocking for a 21st century audience (ladies in bras! implied sex outside marriage!), but because of the Production Code and the even-more stringent rules placed on TV in the early days, most people associate all pre-1960s media with Andy Hardy-like innocence and a Pleasantville-style denial of sexuality or drugs or toilets or the idea that good doesn’t always prevail. This is obviously not true and most smart people know this, but I think most of them still get a thrill out of seeing Stella Dallas in her underpants. Nevertheless, the sexist selling points don’t mean the whole enterprise should be thrown out, especially considering how much less sexist these movies are than many of the ’40s and ’50s Hollywood melodramas I so adore.

1. Night Nurse (William A. Wellman, 1931): So this is the story of how Barbara Stanwyck (very young and brunette) is working as a night nurse to these two sick kids, but they are only sick because of their corrupt doctor, their drunken mom, and the scary chauffeur who wants to get at their trust fund (played by a very young and attractive Clark Gable, who’s always running around in boots, roughing ladies up). Somehow the fact that the children are dying of malnutrition and not actually being fed despite their desire for food doesn’t really motivate anyone else coming in contact with them (their apparently constantly drunk mom, their governess/maid, the other nurse) think that maybe something should be done about that. Except good ol’ Barbara Stanwyck. Luckily, with the help of a friendly bootlegger and a doctor she knows from her training, she saves the day! Oh yeah, and she hooks up with the bootlegger. Who solves most of the plot’s problems by threatening people with violence and actually has Clark Gable killed. That is how the movie ends: he tells Barbara that he had Gable killed, and they drive off together. Yay! I am making it sound kind of terrible, but it is actually a pretty good time. There is lots of action, it’s fast-paced, the acting is great (Stanwyck’s great, and so is Joan Blondell as her more cynical nursing peer).
2. Three On A Match (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932): This was less cheerfully amoral that Night Nurse, but it was also a way better movie by almost any other measure. So you’ve got three school chums: Ann Dvorak (the popular successful girl — which of course at this point in time means marrying a rich dude), Joan Blondell (the bad girl), and Bette Davis (the good girl). Bette Davis was apparently the least famous at the time and doesn’t really do anything in this movie besides apparently leave her lucrative office job to work for as a governess for her best friend, so I won’t really talk about her. But of course the other “good” girl and the “bad” girl wind up switching places: Ann Dvorak runs away from her rich husband to hook up with some sketchy guy and party and drink and neglect her (totally adorable) child, while Joan Blondell doesn’t really care what Ann Dvorak does, but doesn’t think the poor kid should be dragged into it, so she goes to Mr. Ann Dvorak to intervene on the kid’s behalf and eventually they wind up getting married, so she literally takes her friend’s place. Anyway, the biggest revelation in this movie is Dvorak’s performance, which really gets across the ennui of married life and the fun of being a drunk, as well as her desperation when she and her son get kidnapped (by a young, shockingly hot Humphrey Bogart). The other thing that really distinguishes it is the details: you don’t just hear how she’s neglecting her son, you literally get Ann Dvorak lounging with a cocktail when the little boy walks in, filthy, begging for food. She’s all like “Eat this”, and you get a close-up of some half-eaten hors d’oeuvres (devilled eggs and stuff). So harsh.
3. Female (Michael Curtiz, 1933): Nonetheless, this was my favourite of the group, and it will be pretty easy to see why once you read the IMDB summary: “Alison is owner and successful manager of an automobile factory. She also has a good relation to her employees – especially the male ones, which she is known to invite to her bed for some time and then dump quickly. Only the inventor Jim Thorne refuses her offers – will she fire or marry him?” It’s awesome because she’s basically Samantha Jones from Sex and the City, back when that was really edgy; she even talks about how she’s got no use for marriage and that she can have sex just like a man. Her bachelorette pad is totally amazing also: the art director deserves mega points for putting her in this huge modernist house (actually the Ennis House by Frank Lloyd Wright — I can imagine what a more explicitly feminist Thom Anderson would do with that one) with animal prints everywhere and a giant rhino head on the wall of her seduction room. Of course, at the end, she reforms and decides to get married and give up all this crazy career nonsense, but the fact that this character existed at all, let alone that she is so much fun, makes it hard to take the neat ending seriously at all
4. Exotica (Atom Egoyan, 1994): Right after watching this I kind of disliked Exotica — having seen too many movies that slowly put the pieces together like this one did, I didn’t think the “surprises” at the end were surprising enough and I felt like the other stuff, the stylistic and thematic tricks were too weak to make up for that — but it has grown on me the more I think and read about it. It is, at the very least, delicately balanced and complex. It is kind of ingeniously Canadian to have Mia Kirshner strip to Leonard Cohen though. Oh and on a more shallow note, though I couldn’t find any good pics online, Don McKellar in this movie looks unsettlingly like John Darnielle.
5. Turkish Delight (Paul Verhoeven, 1973): I…don’t really know what to do with this movie. I always enjoy Rutger Hauer, clearly. I also took great pleasure in its generally infantile attitude toward sex and bodily functions — there’s a penis-stuck-in-the-zipper scene, 25 years before There’s Something About Mary — but then toward the end it turned melodramatic. Like, the main character literally sets a bird free, on a beach, at sunset. It goes on from there. I’m pretty sure it was fabulous, but I don’t really know, like, what my fake essay I would write if someone made me write an essay on this tomorrow would be. Probably something about the body? I could talk about how crazy Olga looks at the end with all the make-up and the dyed hair and her talk about boob creams and whatnot, and that artificiality is linked to her cancer (oh yeah, she gets cancer after she leaves him to go to America). The America connection is interesting in itself, too. Apparently it’s the most successful Dutch movie ever though.
6. The Vanishing (George Sluizer, 1988): To be clear, this is the Dutch original I’m talking about, not the 1993 remake with Jeff Bridges and Keifer Sutherland. I thought I’d seen the remake, but now I’m not positive. Anyway, this movie is excellent: it’s a sharp little thriller with a cold, cold heart, aka one of my favourite kinds of movies from way back. It’s apparently been compared to Hitchcock a lot, which I get. The fact that the “mystery” is mostly solved early on — there’s never any question about who kidnapped the missing woman, just about what he did to her — and the trouble the hero’s obsessive need to know finally gets him in. (Per the linked Criterion essay, the French title is L’Homme qui voulait savoir or The Man Who Wanted to Know.) I’ve said before that I’m not a particularly easy viewer to surprise, but the ending to this one caught me completely off guard. From Kim Newman’s aforementioned essay:

   It delivers a shattering twist ending, but has a depth and lasting creepiness that makes it repay repeat viewings. Hitchcock always argued for suspense over surprise, but The Vanishing delivers both: the first time you see it, the mystery is intriguing and the solution horrible; the second time, when you know what’s coming, it takes on a more tragic, even more horrifying dimension.

7. Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008): [Spoilers for new movie, behind cut] Continue Reading »

Sorry it’s late this week, I was kind of drowning in work.

1. Le Confessional (Robert Lepage, 1995): This one was pretty interesting. It’s set in Quebec City in 1989 (during the Tiananmen Square massacre and the aftermath), with flashbacks to the late 1950s, when Alfred Hitchcock was in town shooting I Confess (which is about a priest who’s accused of a murder but he can’t clear himself because the guy who did it confessed the crime to him). There are tons of cinematic references to Hitchcock (blood circling in drains and so forth), but I really loved the great masculine melodrama. The hero? He spends most of the movie trying to paint over the shadows left on the wall in his childhood home. It’s great.
2. Once (John Carney, 2007): Aw, this movie’s so sweet. I was surprised by how affecting it was, given that it’s basically a low-budget gloss on the traditional musical rom-com. They meet cute, they bond over their mutual talents, and then they make beautiful music together. Of course, it’s all low-key acting and shot in real city streets, with a charming indifference to things like lighting quality, like in this scene. I thought I was more cynical than that, but I guess not.
3. The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan, 1997): I really enjoyed this movie. It’s told from the very unreliable but fabulous perspective of a crazy Irish boy around the Cuban missile crisis; the actor who plays the boy, Eamonn Owens, is fantastic. There were so many awesome things in this movie, starting with the fact that it makes you laugh at the most horrible things, colouring all this misery in bright reds and having glowing Sinead O’Connor be the Holy Virgin, and ending with the people all walking around with pigs’ heads after a nuclear attack.
   
   And then I spent some time getting to know gay Marxist Spanish director Eloy de la Iglesia, who really embraces the penis in his films.
4. Los placeres ocultos (“Hidden Pleasures”, 1977): Okay, so this movie is all about how gay guys really aren’t that threatening and it’s just their nature and it’s so sad that society won’t accept them. I’d make fun of it except that this was two years after Franco died, when being gay was still totally illegal in Spain. I really like the way de la Iglesia links sexual power to financial power by implying that the hero Eduardo’s influence as a bank manager allowed him to “corrupt” boys. There is also the greatly Marxist sentiment when the straight boy Eduardo’s in love with (who eventually learns to accept him) tells someone that he won’t let anyone take advantage of him, and the activist responds that he basically has more things to worry about than the gays, in that case: “Maybe you’ve been selling more important things and don’t even know it.” I didn’t quite know what to do with the “first season finale of Veronica Mars” ending though.
5. El Diputado (“Confessions of a Congressman”, 1978): This covers a lot of the same ground as Los placeres ocultos, but is much more explicitly political. The hero is a closeted socialist politician who is being set up for exposure by his fascist rivals (this is transition-era Spain, remember).
   The only thing that strains credibility is the fact that a Marxist in the ’70s would never have smoked (or even seen) a joint before. It’s really great though, with the gay love scene intercut with paintings of Marx and Lenin, linking the marginality of Leftists under Franco to the continued marginality of the gays. It ends with a single tear rolling down his face as he prepares to face the judgement of his supposedly liberal peers.
6. Navajeros (I’m not sure of the actual translation — the direct is “knife users,” but I think it’s more like “petty criminals who employ pocketknives,” 1980): Apparently after doing the melodramas about how gay is okay, de la Iglesia moved on to sweet-ass crime stories. Set in Madrid’s depressing housing projects, this is about the greatest most famous juvenile delinquent evar. But that makes it sound lame, when it’s actually awesome. An imdb commenter (usually pretty dumb) compares it to blaxploitation, which is pretty accurate. There’s not a racial element, but it’s a very similar vibe: set in a gritty criminal underworld, high on brutality and political sentiment, made with great skill but not a lot of polish. The last sequence crosscuts between a baby being born (in ridiculously graphic detail) and the hero being gunned down in a senseless and preventable crime. Really impressive.
7. Bulgarian Lovers (2003): This was de la Iglesia’s last movie — it marked his return to movies after a long hiatus precipitated by a heroin addiction — before he died of cancer. It returned to the somewhat homosexual man-man-woman love triangle “family” that we saw in Placeres ocultos and El diputado, but with a much more cynical edge, I guess because he didn’t need to push the gay rights agenda so hard now. I read a bunch of reviews for research and I was surprised that no one really made the film noir connection — Kyril, the hot but poor Bulgarian immigrant is clearly a femme fatale, and he gets the hero Daniel embroiled in this whole dirty nuclear business, and the scene where he realizes what’s up is a total Kiss Me Deadly reference with the whole glowing suitcase. They even dress Daniel up as a 40s film heroine for a short fantasy sequence. Come on, people. (It obviously retains the Marxist concerns of de la Iglesia’s earlier work with its emphasis on the fact that Daniel is totally paying for Kyril’s love.)
8. El Sacerdote (“The priest,” 1978): You can imagine how easy it was to find information in Spanish on a movie called “the priest” directed by a guy whose last name means “of the church,” but this movie was amazing. It directly takes on the repressive nature of the Catholic Church — it’s set in 1960s Spain, when culture was changing but the Church still retained its links to the fascist Franco government — and it’s about a priest who’s driven so crazy by his forbidden desires that he actually castrates himself. It kind of combines all my favourite movie things: melodrama as moral and emotional exploration, weird sex stuff, pretty graphic violence, and penises. (I’m sorry I keep talking about penises, but it’s so rare to see penis in American movies and so common in Spanish movies, it’s hard not to focus on.)

In other news, have my Canadian friends heard about Bill C-10? I was talking to a prof at school who knows Canadian film policy pretty well about what it would mean. Basically, because filmmakers currently assume tax credits when they’re making their movies, the proposed amendment could get money taken away from productions after it’s been spent. The quote in the article is all like “We wouldn’t take tax credit money from something like Eastern Promises, just to really inappropriate movies.” (Note: it’s already illegal to get tax credits for pornography, so that’s not what’s going here.) But if this had happened in the 1970s, I bet they wouldn’t have funded Shivers (whose funding was pretty controversial at the time, what with the sex parasites) or Scanners, and who knows if Cronenberg would be an internationally beloved auteur today. Apparently the real danger isn’t so much the government actively censoring movies, but more that it would put a chill on investment, especially in risky productions, because then investors could get screwed over if the Ministry of Heritage conservative bureaucrats decides a movie’s content isn’t worthwhile. Facebook Group is here, it has more information.

Weekly Movies is a doozy this week (8 films! Many of them involving penises!) and I am kind of in a school crunch so I don’t think it will get updated before Tuesday at the earliest.

Sorry you guys.

Preview:

I kind of want to amend my 2007 best-of.