Some Older Reviews #1

When I decided to make this blog, I felt it was a good idea to post up some of the old reviews I wrote in for my own leisure. In later posts, these will include things that I wrote from around sixteen or so until now, but as of yet I have here three reviews of films I saw for the first time this August that never got used on a forum or another website. Aside from some spelling and grammar corrections, these are the original notes, which means they may not be as polished as the other mini-reviews I have posted on here, and in the case of the review of a Jean-Luc Godard short, show my more controversial and honest opinion of films that needs to be brought out more in my writing. For these reviews, as with all the other short ones I will write old or new, I will have synopses for all of them and links to IMDB or sites which provide any good information on them if possible. I may include trailers from YouTube but I am concerned about them spoiling too much of the films as they can notoriously do (the aesthetic look of the post is just as important a factor; I was going to add the official UK trailer for Life During Wartime (2009) in a previous post, but it was too big for the page and covered the Site Topics list).

So with that, here we go...

The Expendables (Sylvester Stallone, 2010)

‘Barney Ross leads the "Expendables", a band of highly skilled mercenaries including knife enthusiast Lee Christmas, martial arts expert Yin Yang, heavy weapons specialist Hale Caesar, demolitionist Toll Road and loose-cannon sniper Gunner Jensen. When the group is commissioned by the mysterious Mr. Church to assassinate the merciless dictator of a small South American island, Barney and Lee head to the remote locale to scout out their opposition. Once there, they meet with local rebel Sandra and discover the true nature of the conflict engulfing the city. When they escape the island and Sandra stays behind, Ross must choose to either walk away and save his own life - or attempt a suicidal rescue mission that might just save his soul.’ - From IMDB

There is a perverse glee to a film where the explosions and random death is only taking place only by the thinnest of plot threads, or to be honest, no particular reason at all. That said it does feel empty and a little lifeless compared to the action films it is referencing that at least had some character depth and proper story structures. There are still things to like – the small details in scenes, the blatant phallic symbolism of the weapons, the silliness of the exploding heads, and the feeling this reflects the inner children of men of a certain age who idolised these actors – that make for an more interesting film than other blockbusters.

Sweet Movie (Dušan Makavejev, 1974)

‘Pushing his themes of sexual liberation to their boiling point, Yugoslavian art-house provocateur Dušan Makavejev followed his international sensation WR: Mysteries of the Organism with this full-throated shriek in the face of bourgeois complacency and movie watching. Sweet Movie tackles the limits of personal and political freedom with kaleidoscopic feverishness, shuttling viewers from a gynecological beauty pageant to a grotesque food orgy with scatological, taboo-shattering glee. With its lewd abandon and sketch-comedy perversity, Sweet Movie became both a cult staple and exemplar of the envelope pushing of 1970s cinema.’ – From the Criterion Collection website

The ideas behind it, of sexual and political freedom pushed to their farthest, are fascinating and still relevant now, but the film is flawed, not because of the fact I was shocked by the content, but because the work was far too erratic for me to work. Works that nearly take on a surrealist bent can be in danger of having a bad pace and problems with not making sure everything – the satire at the beginning of this for example – is strong enough or original with enough intellectual punch to succeed. This is what I feel is my biggest flaw with Sweet Movie.

Origins of the 21^st Century (Jean-Luc Godard, 2000)

'Commissioned by the heads of the 2000 Cannes Film Festival to make an opening-night short commemorating cinema as it enters its second full century, Godard instead offers up a 17-minute barrage of re-edited footage of wars and Nazi atrocities, interspersed with clips of Maurice Chevalier in "Gigi" and Godard's own "À bout de souffle."' – From IMDB

As with my thoughts on most of Godard’s work, and of some video essay work, the exact meaning of it is not completely graspable, yet this is not a flaw. With the best of these works, and unlike some of Godard’s other work, there is still resonance and an emotional reaction to it as a whole and as individual fragments of image, and this particular Godard unlike others has that power. Its fragments of war atrocity, film, ordinary life and even hardcore pornography still have a great power and a meaning even if one is unsure of Godard’s reason for using them. The work was supposed to be a reflection of cinema of the last decade, but Godard instead, and with inspiration, reflects the decade as a whole itself, and at around 17 minutes, it avoids Godard’s biggest problem of his work of running out of inspiration halfway through, and that fragments are usually far cleverer than their whole sum total together. The only real flaw to this incredible and emotional short is the use of some of the film clips; a few, such as the ones used at the end that do have incredible power, completely work, but some in the middle are slightly pointless. My views of Godard as an erratic director still remain, but this and the beginning of Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988-1998) show that, despite 90% of his work I’ve seen being not that great, the 10% left is someone who is intelligent and capable of truly thoughtful ideas. He is now an experimenter whose work is highly divisive for me, but which I will still see as it may contain things as powerful as this particular short.

Additional Notes – After I wrote the review of Godard’s Origins of the 21^st Century, I managed to watched the whole of Histoire(s) du Cinema. Sadly the middle episodes – from Seul le cinéma (1997) to Une Vague Nouvelle (1998) – slip in quality drastically, but the whole thing is still a praiseworthy project. Not only is the first part Toutes les histoires (1988) Godard’s best work so far and a masterpiece, but the rest of the episodes are great and insightful, with the perfect conclusion in Les Signes parmi nous (1998).

Additional Notes 2 – Sweet Movie is still worth viewing as long as you have a strong stomach. As a piece of subversive cinema, it needs to be watched to stray out of your comfort zone when it comes to the taboos it pushes, and its importance in world cinema. It also needs to be seen because of the unlikely casting of late American actor John Vernon as Mr. Kapital in the first half, one of the richest men in the whole world with an obsession with sanitation and bizarre piece of anatomy. Known by me mainly for Animal House (1978) and Dirty Harry (1971), spotting him in this still controversial arthouse film raises my opinion of him even higher despite not rating the film itself greatly.