First
of all, I'm going to include the links to reviews for works talked about in
"B" and "C":
From
now on links to reviews, if available, will be included in each segment like
with the first entry.
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| Daisies
(Vera Chytilová, 1966) Revisiting this, I was a completely different type of film viewer who was finally able to see its virtues. Anarchic and rich in invention, the change in my attitude to the unconventional structure of films like this has been rewarding for being able to appreciate their ideas and creation. The ideas themselves are also completely more free spirited, imaginative and alive than the morose highbrow films that I used to like while being ambivalent to films like this. I celebrate having grown up through a film where two women don't grow up to snub the dullness of society. A link to a review of mine here. |
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| Damsels
in Distress (Whit Stillman, 2011) Having watched quite a few films this year about twenty or so white, middle class people stuck without goals - seeing my first Mumblecore work too - I've not been fond of them. In fact they feel stunted creativity and stale, not able to say anything of interest as much as the characters. They're pleased with themselves about this even though they, like my bad times with Joe Swanberg, completely negate the importance of visual construction or real life cadence in characters' dialogue. Damsels... did, with the sense of a director who snubs any celebration view of adult infantilism while yet still giving us young adults who are spritely and fun to be with. Its content could have been just as bad as the other films - the dance numbers, the character who doesn't know what colours are - but instead it feel sincerely sweet than being stuck in a bubble. Its ability to do so is through subtleness and being able to step out from these characters' lives while being at their side; its significant this and the other film in this part which deal with the issue of people lost in their lives are from directors who came long before Mumblecore was even in gestation. |
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| Dario
Argento Reevaluation (Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), Deep Red (1975), Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980), Tenebrae (1982), Phenomena (1985), Opera (1987)) Before I somewhat found Argento contrived and dull. Now those concepts have completely vanished. The films are pulpy, lurid works, which is completely acceptable for me. They work well and the unpredictability in them, where they go for broke like Phenomena, or the really interesting ones like Tenebrae undermine expectations, make up for any potential flaws by the fact Argento has always tried to make films that weren't cookie cutter material but something inherently cinematic or interesting. Even Giallo (2009) or The Card Player (2004), in hindsight, while incredibly flawed films, were unpredictable and adamant in breaking away from the generic natures of murder thrillers, and in his golden period (mostly) represented above, the use of numerous cinematographic areas and plot structure styles were always bold and inventive. Even to the point that some of the films, like Deep Red, play with you with your belief in what you can see on camera, where the eyes are directed to, in making its plot stings as much questioning your ability to perceive. And when he did suddenly put heavy metal in inappropriate places in the scores, it wasn't as if other Italian directors were doing it the same as he was either. Links to reviews for Four Flies..., Inferno and Opera here, here and here respectively. |
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| Dark
Horse (Todd Solondz, 2011) Shares with Damsels in Distress the same mood of people left adrift. Damsels... is optimistic for its female protagonists because they could go somewhere. cinematographic man-child main character is still living with his parents past his thirties and is egotistic, childish and short tempered, but Solondz is still empathetic to him even when the results of the narrative say otherwise. It's strange Solondz has become this dismissed figure now in American cinema when he's one of the only few bold enough to be thoughtful to even the most morally reprehensible of his characters. Happiness (1998) is controversial for many aspects especially surrounding the father who is a paedophile, but the real braveness of Solondz was to make this character a fully formed human being alongside the others. Years later with Dark Horse the quality of his work is still strong, suggesting that the terrible marginalisation of him as a director will at least have one virtue, in pushing him away from compromising any films he'll hopefully make in the future. |
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| Daughters
of Darkness (Harry Kümel, 1971) I'm reminded of an episode of a podcast I used to listen to, which stopped abruptly, never releasing any more episodes a few years ago, where one of the hosts trashed this film and most of the horror genre for their quality and not being scary. Honestly, most horror cinema is bad, but bear in mind every genre (which Drama technically is too) is just as full of bad work. And scariness is not a necessary aspect of the horror film, and even the name of the genre may be misleading. It's about taking reality and, through concepts of mythology or human fears/desires, making them tangible, where even for an atheist their everyday surroundings take on a phantasmagorical depth. What is the meaning of this film? A woman encounters another who is more than likely a vampire, that's it barring the potential referencing of Carmilla. What it is about is the sensation of being isolated in long corridors. Sat in a bedroom that's not your own as someone, a potential threat or nocturnal lover, is drifting in slowly. The countryside and roads choked in mist. The claustrophobia of a bathroom and the remnants of something horrible happening in one. Most good taste films just sit on a soapbox and babble incontinently or to the point of boring the viewers with the incredibly obvious. The lower taste genre works like horror, action, even erotica/porn only suffer because the hack work in them is targeted more often than that in good taste films, but at their best, if one is willing to admit oneself to "bad taste", they can show new sides of human life, for any potential flaws or questionable perversions they have, that rarely get shown when they need to be. Not only political and social commentary, but also the ability to view ordinary things taken for granted in unperceived ways. That's why a film like this deserves more to say about and why I view the kinds of film I do. |
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| David
Cronenberg (The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981), eXistenZ (1999)) And speaking of intelligence in horror cinema we get to Cronenberg. My view of him now as a director of drama and adaptations needs to be thought about, somewhat beset with disappointment with the first viewings, but the director of body horror films with profound food for thought still stands strong. When dealing with his work the sense that they exist in their own worlds become apparent; for its flaws, Scanners is still one of the best films of its kind, and it feels as much as a work set in an alternative Canada as an exploitation film. The sense of being forced to view one's body and mind in ways you didn't before takes place after watching many of his films including in those mentioned above. |
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| The
Day the Earth Caught Fire (Val Guest, 1961) Trying to grasp a rock solid mine of wealth in British cinema is of yet unattended, with the sense of an inferiority complex dangerously close, but a film like this suggests that great films did exist from my country even in unexpected places. An end-of-the-world scenario that's compelling for how the characters behave and act as the planet drifts closer and closer to the sun, the sense of desperation mixed with hope felt. What features in the best British films is the lack of hesitation in going with these mixed thoughts that people have, the internal having always been a key area of British art at its best. The hope the characters show here is not for the sake of the Queen or country, just the hope for another day or for it to end quickly to not suffer. |
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| Decoder
(Muscha, 1984) The power of noise to overthrow governments has not come into fruition as this film speculated. Instead, in a bizarre twist director Muscha would have never expected, noise and pop melody have made a harmony bed in some areas of music and produced peculiar offspring of immense listening delight. But what Decoder is still relevant for and is its true message, alongside its complete disregard for mainstream acceptance, is people getting together to create regardless of what society thinks. The characters in this use their creativity to knock fast food restaurants down a peg, then the whole society, but the film itself is the creation of artists, people who have lived immensely in such young lives, and musicians who wanted to express themselves without compromise. And they not only did so, but beautifully, embraced the past for the added depth to their subversion too, where Metropolis (1927), film noir, and William Burroughs are amongst the many pieces of the final work. A link to the review here. |
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| Destricted
[US Cut] (Various Directors, 2006 Onwards) The Destricted project went with a whimper when it came about many years ago, although to my surprise, an American release version with new contributions alongside the previous shorts came to light. I need to see the few shorts that were excised for the new ones, but now it's a shame that a work willing to deal with pornography and sex was not taken to be anything of real interest. The potential hypocrisy of the excuse for cumshots and penetration could have happened, especially as some of the artists used existing porn and (literally in one case) scratched their own inclusions onto them, but the only real flaw for this project is that Gaspar Noe is turning into such a heavy handed and pretentious director for me (unfortunately) as I keep rewatching his films again. I hated a lot of the shorts in the original version of Destricted, but while there are a few I need to resee, the only one that is still bad is his which has inadvertedly showed up all of his worse flourishes in a repititious work of brutality. But others, including ones I previously liked, shine further. Matthew Barney is willing to break the taboo of flesh and industrial machine becoming one, and the fact that amongst the new inclusions, one director decided that just the images of lips pressing against glass and smearing coloured liquids around it was inherently erotic showed that the project was far from the boring failure I once thought it was. The one many speak of is Larry Clark's and its with good reason; while its having its cake and eating it by being an actual porn sex scene too at the end, to have the participants, and those who didn't get filmed in that final sequence, open up honestly about sexuality or project themselves is fascinating and rich. What results is incredibly awkward, clumsy and untitilating, but also erotic and titillation at the same time, the contradictions put forward equally in a way that really shows complexity in the subject really seen. The best of the work in Destricted does so too alongside it. |
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| Dialogos
(Ülo Pikkov, 2008) Of the many benefits of being a writer for Videotape Swapshop, alongside being part of a group of friendly people writing reviews of the kinds of things we want to talk about, and people like to read, is the idiosyncratic personalities of my co-writers, especially the obscurer or out-there references they make in their write-ups. Never in a co-writer's review of Belladonna of Sadness (1973) did I expect him to make a reference to an obscure, abstract Estonian animated short, but that reference is why the humorous ditty called Dialogos has managed to get on this list. Both a testament to the littlest works having the most value, especially when they're clearly handdrawn and carefully thought up, and the joy of unbridled weirdness and visual puns just for the sake of them. |
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| Django,
Kill… If You Live, Shoot!/Death Laid an Egg (Giulio Questi, 1967-8) Not what is to be expected with either the spaghetti western or the giallo, a political director taking these genres and twisting them inside out. Django,Kill..., despite being the more famous one, is weaker in comparison with the gem that is Death Laid An Egg, but both of them completely disorientate your perceptions for either type of sub-genre. A review for Death Laid An Egg can be found here. |
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| D-Grade
Martial Arts Films They're sloppily made. Dubbed with ridiculous English voice acting. "Preserved" on DVD from fuzzy VHS or old film reels. They have been forgotten and left in the martial arts segment in second hand DVD racks. But like a few other things I've talked about previously, I've fallen in love with these films for their creativity, rack shackle nature, and the fact that they still have slivers of quality despite this, ie. good martial artists and some creative fight ideas. Unlike Western martial art films which, for the most part, don't let the martial arts themselves stand out, or have any idiosyncrasies to them, films from the East like the ones I saw, while sloppily made, still allow the skills of the actors to be seen, and even for cultural ideas to be dissected in such conventional plots in fascinating ways. And when these films get ridiculous, they surpass most American films for going for broke in their bizarreness. For two examples I reviewed on the blog, look into Snake Fist of A Buddhist Dragon(1979) and Strike of Thunderkick Tiger (1982). |
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| Don’t
Go Near the Park (Lawrence D. Foldes, 1981) In terms of the kind of American pulp cinema I'm getting attached to in their richness, there and what is accidentally said in them, as I do with nineties anime and D-list martial arts films, its westerns or films like this, peculiar hybrids in exploitation cinema that cannot be easily defined in a category or simply explained. A film that feels like a sixties movie, suddenly becomes seventies in the middle, but was made in the early eighties. More tangents than a forked road. Managed to get on the Video Nasties list for a reason I cannot understand. The ending moment has imprinted slides in my mind for reasons I cannot explain. Badly added lazers. And yet it feels far more of an American film than most Hollywood films in its tone, the accents and gestures of its (badly acting) cast, the setting and what odd directions it goes into. Just a strange, strange film. |
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| Dragon
Lord (Jackie Chan, 1982) I may prefer this to even an acclaimed film like Police Story (1985). I like how its protagonist stumbles into the main plot involving villains by pure accident. I like how it takes sporting events and make them as elaborate, brutal and wonderfully choreographed as combat sequences. I like how playful it is, silly and flippant, for most of its length but then has a brutal and stunning final conflict. In contrast to the D-list martial arts films, which succeed in their bloody-mindedness, this feels well thought out even if slight, and fully formed. It playfulness seems more interesting than Police Story because, instead of nearly killing himself in each insane stunt after the next, Jackie Chan is allowed to be to comedic goofball and athletic star far more here in the narrative, more concerned for romance than throwing himself down ceiling lights for the sake of the stunt. |
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| Dumbland
(David Lynch, 2002) Even though its completely rudimentary animation and just strange for the sake of strange, Lynch manages to make something of interest. Maybe because it's so upfront about being this weird and rudimentary looking. Knowing Lynch created a comic strip called The Angriest Dog In The World which reused the same panel over and over with new text, the most basic of things for him can have such a peculiar effect on the viewer. That and Dumbland is so unbridled in how disturbing it is, the worst in people shown in a fittingly crude form. The episode where the viewer is battered by all the noise and sound of a street environment sums up the work as what it feels like to be trapped in an everyday "normal" life where people become warped. |
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| Dünyayi
kurtaran adam aka. Turkish Star Wars (Çetin Inanç, 1982) The true clusterfuck of cult cinema. I cannot avoid using such an abrasive word for something like this film, even though it might be crude to do so, revisiting it many years later. Atonal, messy, chaotic and random. Abrupt inclusions in the editing that cause you to jump and split screen dismemberment that isn't done properly. An oval shaped Death Star and Flash Gordon (1980) music played in unexpected places. Gold painted cardboard swords and punching rocks. It is everything done wrong in conventional filmmaking, but becomes something magnificent for this reason. It cannot be justified as a great piece of cinema, but it becomes inherently surreal in its jumbled take on Turkish sci-fi heroes. I argue that, if techniques done in this were done on purpose in other films, you could get an incredible work from it. A review can be found here. |
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Raw screenshots harvested from
these local sources:
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http://carlosnightman.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/earthcaughtfire21.jpg
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http://content.internetvideoarchive.com/content/photos/6416/26949315_.jpg
http://www.allcluesnosolutions.com/products_pictures/Death_Laid_An_Egg_(M).jpg
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https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-MkQzUi8AZDU/T0vb7kF4EEI/AAAAAAAAKFI/koodmJohCaM/don't_go_near_the_park_(1981).jpg
http://www.dvdactive.com/images/reviews/screenshot/2003/9/dragon_lord_r2_01.jpg
http://m5.paperblog.com/i/14/141850/dumbland-2002-610-L-CrPoKW.png
http://imagesturk.net/images/2013/09/26/cUG5V.jpg
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