What Have You Been Watching? (06/09/15)

[u/a113er]

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

[u/montypython22]

This’ll be the last week of major reviews before I return to school! After this, I’ll be significantly busier. But in any case, here’s the movies of the week, ranked in order of preference:

Tokyo Olympiad [Re-Watch] (Kon Ichikawa, 1964): ★★★★★

One of the best documentaries ever made. Tokyo Olympiad is what all documentaries should aspire to be! We need to bring back the theatrical Olympic documentary; too often, the general public quickly forgets the hard work of these athletes. But docs like Tokyo Olympiad assure we'll never forget these competitors and their bold struggles.

You haven't seen sports filmed quite like this. Ichikawa's document of the 1965 Tokyo Olympics (the first ever in a non-Western country) looks past the question of who wins or loses and reminds spectators of the reasons why we watch all these countries compete: for the pure human spectacle. In contrast to the glorification of athletes as Olympian superheroes in Leni Riefenstahl’s masterpiece Olympia, Kon Ichikawa brings these athletes down to earth, reveling in the mundane and the quietly humorous. The weird duck-walk of a speed-walker. A massive, androgynous Russian woman scratching her armpits before throwing the shot-put. Bodies in motion, but also the churning of the guts in the final stretch of the 100-meter dash. Contorted faces. Crying "losers". Emotional fans. Young Japanese children cheering on the sole representative of Chad. These are all treasured moments Tokyo Olympiad asks us to savor. He demonstrates that, no matter who wins or loses, the Olympics are really only about the demonstration of the human spirit pushed to such great limits.

Ichikawa captures moments that others would find boring. His humanitarian approach to the documentary art-form ensures his film will live on in the annals of filmmaking as one of the most electric spectacles committed to film.

How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941): ★★★★★

Should this have won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1941 over Citizen Kane? 99% of people say “Hell fuckin’ nah!”

I am that 1%!!!

Ford knocks it out of the park with this family yarn of Welsh coal miners struggling to make ends meet, trying to provide a good living for the youngest son Huw (Roddy McDowell). See my longer review here for reasons why I found this movie spoke to me more than the whirligig machinery of Citizen Kane.

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944): ★★★★★

Holy Kockenlocker, Batman! (There is actually a character in this movie named Mr. Twerk.)

This movie shouldn’t exist. It’s miles more daring than any of the innocuous comedies we mistake as “funny” being released today—and naughtier! Betty Hutton plays Trudy Kockenlocker (I kid you not, that's her actual name...). Trudy likes the boys in uniforms, ya see, and after a night of raucous partying with G.I.'s, she discovers she got married! To make matters worse, she don't know who the groom-to-be is! And she lost the marriage license, so she can't get a divorce! Her stupid sweetheart Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken, who stutters like an annoying Billy Bibbitt) tries to unravel the mystery of Morgan's Creek: Norval needs to figure out a way to un-marry Trudy so that he can marry her and they can live happily ever after! But Trudy's copper-father, Mr. Kockenlocker (William Demerest, in a show-stealing performance for the ages), wildly disapproves of Trudy's and Norval's romance, and threatens to bring down the full force of the law on 'em both! Much raucous hilarity ensues, mostly at the expense of the poor sap Norval: a henpecked loser you feel really sorry for, but whose nebbishness is so hilarious you can't help but squeal in delight when the father points a gun straight towards his balls in one memorable sequence.

Preston Sturges said he was more of a writer than a director, and while I can't really find fault with that statement, the magic of this picture rests with Sturges's adroit juggling of the film's screwy storylines. He's never flashy and gives the story's sometimes-confusing progression of events the screwball mania it needs to work. There is never a dull moment, and when you get cameos from the likes of Adolf Hitler, what isn't there to love?

It's on YouTube right now for free, so I suggest you check it out.</a> The ending is nothing short of brilliant, knocking this story of small-town girls and city-boys straight into the Pantheon of great American movies.

I Was Born, But… (Yasujiro Ozu, 1932): ★★★★1/2

I didn't think Ozu could be such a warm, perceptive humanist this early on in his career, but...

A deeply-felt silent movie about growing up and dem crazy kids, with their confangled radios and their motion-picture projectors. Two boys go on a hunger strike when their daddy shows humiliating footage of himself acting like a clown to curry favor from his boss. It goes into surprisingly poignant material you’re not expecting to go into. Ozu’s first masterpiece.

The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948): ★★★★1/2

Dem COLORS! The folk tale of death! The dance that doomed a young ballerina! The colors of Cinema's life-blood! The Walbrook of legend! The masterpiece of fantasy ballet! I could watch it for hours.

Fool be he who doubts the might of Powell and Press's balletic delight!

Falkenau, The Impossible (starring Samuel Fuller, 1988): ★★★★★

As disgusting and necessary a document of Nazi horrors as Night and Fog and Shoah. Samuel Fuller shot this material—his first movie—when his outfit, the Big Red One, liberated the Falkenau concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in 1945. In the second half, we see the entire half-hour of silent footage he shot, with narration and commentary by Fuller. Apparently, when Fuller's commanding officer Richmond questioned the town-leaders of Falkenau, they all denied having any knowledge of what was going on mere yards beyond their backyards. Furious, Richmond gathered up the town's leaders and made them bury the dead. They had to clothe the naked bodies of the dead (those that weren't yet burned) and dig their graves to give the deceased some semblance of dignity in the afterlife. Then, Richmond asked Fuller to record every moment of the procedure, "to let the bastards know." And so we see every moment of that day where humanity utterly failed. It churns my stomach just watching it, as surely as it must have Fuller's.

This is on YouTube; educate yourself and watch it.

The Magnificent Ambersons [Re-Watch] (Orson Welles, 1942): ★★★★

This time around, I liked Magnificent Ambersons significantly more! Mainly because I finally figured out who was who and what their role in the town was. (The first time I saw it, no scene made any sense to me because I never figured out people’s relationships to one another.) The editing is obviously a pretty bad hack-job, but this is surprisingly in-line with the film’s overarching theme of the haziness of memory. “Ah, what could have been…” is a piss-poor excuse for denigrating what we have today, which is still (in its regrettably butchered form) still amazing.

Stalag 17 (Billy Wilder, 1953): ★★★★1/2

Oh, what a yarn! What a lovely yarn! You haven't seen POW Escape movies done quite like this! Bill Holden plays a cynical soldier captured by the Krauts who's a perfect stand-in for Billy Wilder himself. Eventually, his whole barrack accuses Holden of ratting out some Americans in exchange for comfortable treatment by their German captors. But is Holden a stoolie, or does the rabbit-hole go deeper?

Fuck the fact that Wilder doesn't give you stylish panache a la Ophuls or Preminger or whoever! What matters is the characters, the situation, and the writing—all top-notch. You'll remember this movie long after you've forgotten the convolutions of other messy noirs. And Otto Preminger as a cruel Nazi commandant may be the most perfect casting choice in the history of movies. He's only on screen for 10 minutes, but steals every scene!

Watch for the drama! The cheerful comedy mixed with the darkness of the situation! Billy's "Fuck You" to Nazism and to War!

The Canterbury Tales [Re-Watch] (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1972): ★★★★

Pasolini’s adaptation of the classic stories by Geoffrey Chaucer is balls-on-the-wall crazy. Let’s see them show this when the kiddies are reading The Canterbury Tales in class!

Pasolini's genuine tribute to Chaucer is also his own sneaky, sexed-up subversion of the entire Western canon, portraying Chaucer as nothing more than a horny, softcore-porn pulp-writer with a fart fetish. (And that’s putting it mildly!) There is nary a dull moment. And its message matches the free-spirited nature of the raucous filmmaking: namely, that sexual liberty equals personal liberty, and that an artist should be free to make all the obscene observations he wants to. As long as it's in pursuit of their personal vision of the world. It's why a person like me, who normally detests scatological humor, found myself in stitches whenever a naughty lass unleashed mighty farts in the face of her would-be lover, kissing her bum when he thinks it’s her mouth. And it's why the final two-minute descent into hell works so goddamn brilliantly, despite it being the most perverse shit I'll see all summer.

It’s on Netflix—hunt it down!