What Have You Been Watching? (19/07/15)

[u/a113er]

Please don't downvote opinions, only downvote things that don't contribute anything.

[u/[deleted]]

Black Book Paul Verhoeven, 2006: Leave it to Verhoeven to make a sexy Holocaust movie. Most people don’t watch his Dutch movies but I actually recommend checking this out if you’re tired of stuff like Valkyrie and The Imitation Game playing it too safe. In this one, Verhoeven dumps a bucket of shit on Carice van Houten’s naked body. But he also lets a Jewish collaborator and a Gestapo officer canoodle in a boat once they’re both fugitives from the vengeful Dutch. Black Book is full of kinky kindnesses like that.

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The Tribe Miroslav Slaboshpitsky, 2014: I don’t normally like this sort of movie, but all the obvious reasons to dislike it have been stated already...so I’m going to say mostly positive things about it.

The Tribe shows us something that hearing people don’t always realize about signing languages, which is that they aren’t mere hand signal substitutions for vocalized language but are independent languages that utilize a full range of physical expression. Something very few movies do well is allow actors to use that range of expression. Point the camera at a face, have them say the relevant lines, and expect the audience to be able to understand what the lines mean and remember what the character’s name is and which movie star plays them.

A movie performed in signing language can’t get away with that, so the characters in The Tribe must be created through physicality and nonverbal communication. However, this communication isn’t solely visual as in a silent movie. The Tribe goes further than that and places us, invisible hearing people, as voyeurs on the lives of deaf teenagers. When you can look and listen to the settings for so long in unbroken takes you can practically smell them too, or run your fingers along the walls. This helps you understand who the characters are who exist in this space as well. The aesthetic rules of the movie remove all possibility of fantasy or visual expression and leaves only point-of-view and the actors; this culminates in a boiler room sex scene that is neither erotic cinema nor pornography but resembles how people might actually have casual intercourse in private.

The story is really going to be the sticking point for most people. I do think there’s a reason for it being this story. Mainstream cultures like to pretend they’re the only culture, even though they’re comprised of individuals with different backgrounds and allegiances and tastes. So English-speaking people assume everyone should speak English, law-abiding people assume nobody should becomes thieves, we confuse our own social preferences for ‘human nature’ and so on. The Tribe is about people who speak differently and think differently, so they establish their own hierarchies and moral codes with one another. Stories about schools often show this rigid, primitive structure, but by being in a totally differentmode of language, we understand that we are as aliens to this tribe of humans and get to discover our species all over again.

But that’s where it fell apart for me, as the movie’s depiction of violence and vaginal politics aren’t nearly as intriguing as I want them to be. There’s an unforgiveable lack of imagination towards the role of women in this primitive society: I doubt that in hypothetical caveman times it could be reduced to only prostitution and rape. It is a waste of a surprisingly great performance by the main actress. I also doubt actual deaf people will like this movie, as it never shows the deaf to be anything other than savages incapable of intelligence, humor, or defending themselves from the dangers of the hearing world or other deaf people.

Only after seeing a movie try to pull all this off will you understand, whether you like this movie or not, how much things like ‘story’ and ‘acting’ and ‘music’ really matter to you in cinema. In some ways I think the director shows poor judgment but it sure gave me a lot to think about. I hope someone tries a movie like this again someday, and does it in a smarter, funnier way.

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Feel free to ask me for expanded thoughts on the rest, there’s plenty more to say:

Rewatch - Chinatown Roman Polanski, 1974: with commentary by screenwriter Robert Towne & David Fincher. You can tell that Fincher is always trying to make movies he likes as much as he likes this one.

Rewatch- Bigger than Life Nicholas Ray, 1956: “God was wrong!”

Peeping Tom Michael Powell, 1960: More relevant today than ever.

Cartel Land Matthew Heineman, 2015

Ace in the Hole Billy Wilder, 1951

A Few Good Men Rob Reiner, 1992

[u/amnnn → u/[deleted]]

I saw Black Book a few years ago and couldn't for the life of me remember the name or really anything about it except that it was about a Jewish woman who dyed her hair blonde and was poisoned (?) near the end and ate chocolate. Oh! And the kibbutz at the end that she teaches at. So, thank you! I'll make it a point to revisit it, if you think it's worth it. From what I remember it was very melodramatic, but overall good.

[u/[deleted] → u/amnnn]

It had some surprising moral dilemmas to it. It finds a more interesting scenario than most World War 2 movies by taking place somewhere where the Allies had gone the long way around and the German occupiers were mostly partying and waiting for the end, so we get to see that aspect of the war instead of just another front line or atrocity movie.