Most Meaningful First Viewings and Re-Evaluations of 2013 Part 8: The "M"s

It's already February and I'm only halfway through. Oh well, contrary to what I originally though, to try and really write about films and work that were memorable to you is a lot more difficult especially in explaining why.

Macabre (Lamberto Bava, 1980)
In the least expected place, from the director of Demons (1985), I ended up seeing quite a curious, slow burning psychodrama. Still lurid as to be expected from a lot of Italian genre films, but it stands out for combining the dramatic with the gross.

Macross Plus (Shinichirô Watanabe and Shôji Kawamori, 1994)
I haven't seen this since I was a teenager or so. Rewatching this last year I'm baffled I never watched it again until then. It's an anime where the thought "This is legitimately good." came to mind watching it. Its full, tightly plotted melodrama. The music. The beautiful, extravagant animation and visual designs. It stands out as a tent pole for how anime, even if it's not the cerebral work of Mamoru Oshii, can still be made as high art when it's clear the creators cared to make something spectacular.

Mad Bull 34 (Satoshi Dezaki, 1991)
On the opposite side is an anime I cannot morally defend. Too much of the content blurs between being ironic, and just being tasteless and misogynistic. But I have to confess to watching it with a baffled awe at how it goes through this content as it does. I think of an image, whether you could defend it or not, of a pulp writer, slamming alcohol down his throat to keep himself conscious, writing whatever content they could come up with, in violence and sex, to keep the reader turning the pages, to an intensity of someone desperately living off each pay check from each story he violently births into reality. Stuff in Mad Bull, adapted from a manga author whose reputation suggests this kind of mad, desperate pulp writer with no self censorship, cannot be defended. Then the main character reveals he has grenades in his trousers kept still by being tied into his pubic hair...and you wonder if you're dealing with something that's just offensive or some deranged hyper-ridiculous pulp story that falls in the comical. It's difficult to say it's ironic in its tone, but showing a New York that feels more fed by American serial killer films, reality TV shows about police, and violent action movies, rather than the real New York, there is this quality of a mirror in this to the kind of material that the US makes its image of itself to show to others. A perverse (likely unintentional) social comment masquerading as something this dumb and tasteless, or just dumb and tasteless without any intelligent defence of worth. And that's not taking into consideration the final episode involving the Predator, a mech suit and wedding by threat of death ending.

Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh, 2012)
Worth mentioning for the first Soderbergh film I've seen where an actual human being, rather than a robot, seemed to have made the film. There was clearly no way he could pull this down in cold, soulless filmmaking with its cast, electro remix of Its Raining Men, and desire for bared male flesh.

Magnos The Robot [English, Feature Length Edit of TV Series]
(Tomoharu Katsumata, 1976 & 1984)
Infamous for being the giant robot show where, when the male and female heroes' robots form into Magnos, they transform into its belt buckle. A show that is not looked at fondly, and one over thirty episodes an American producer thought would be wise to turning into a ninety minute feature film. The result is a mess, but if it's a character flaw in me in terms of good taste, something like this was catnip. Bold, primary colours, ridiculous monster designs, a whole mass of seventies animated sci-fi from Japan that, for its questionable English dub and belt buckle transformations, was compelling as real entertainment in its silliness and out of it being accidental pop art. I've always believe if someone took something like this and did it in their work intentionally,  it would legitimately great art and great entertainment, because the mistakes and kitsch in work like this could be used as intentional tools at questioning genre as well as adoring it. The problem is that most genre films of now that do this are ironic and intentionally "bad", half hearted as a result. What is needed is a sincere desire to tell a great story that just happens to stand back occasionally and wonder why the secondary Russian character's accent is so wonky.

A Man Vanishes (Shohei Imamura, 1967)
With a film like this - reviewed here on the site - the concept that a documentary is merely a factual text to learn from is fully suspect in comparison to what a work like this was able to do. Reality was punctured by the director's involvement, which he doesn't try to hide, like modern documentary directors of now do a great deal of, and rather than be a contrived soap opera the result was to admit to the complexity of human emotions in a situation of a man disappearing. Imamura's fictional films managed to be this deep in these ideas too.

The Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismäki, 2002)
A perfect film, but it ends with the perfect ending too. Railway tracks. Stay by Marko Haavisto & Poutahaukat starts to play, a soulful Roy Orbison-meets-blues song, over the end credits. Magical.

The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)
The abstract edits. Disconnection. Time going forward quickly. That for the aspects that could be seen as dated, the premise of an alien to human culture being dragged down by it is still able to be used as a comment on our society still. Our liability for paranoia. Greed. And for an being to ignore their desired goal in the folly of intoxicating distractions.

Marwencol (Jeff Malmberg, 2010)
Not all modern documentaries fall into the sense of merely creating a "story" that tells you how to feel. This one, in covering the life of Mark Hogancamp, an artist and photographer who lost his memories after a violent assault and constructed meaning to his life after by creating a miniature world from dolls in a quasi-World War II town, lets the world of Marwencol and Hogancamp speak for themselves. What could have easily viewed Hogancamp in a patronising light instead lets him talk about himself fully. Some of it is discomforting. Some it goes against what is expected to be socially "normal". But not only is he allowed to speak, but Marwencol takes on a universal metaphor, with stories set in the town with his alter ego within it told, of a mental landscape created to trawl into one's existence when memories are lost. The result allows Hogancamp to both gain meaning in his life, and unexpected fame, while the town of dolls, reacting to life and moments of pain from Hogancamp's real experiences, becomes an entity with its own life and existence through his creation of it. The film even ends with Marwencol taking on a further meta dimension of Hogancamp's consciousness that befits the nature that creation is as much an extension of understanding oneself as it is to express oneself to others.

Maurice Pialat
(L’Enfance nue (1968), We Won’t Grow Old Together (1972),
Passe Ton Bac D’Abord (1979), Loulou (1980))
Human interaction is just as abstract as in fiction, where happiness can suddenly become anger or both at the same time. Truly realistic dramas show this than pretend to be real with their dialogue or aesthetics. Pialat in the films above is just as unconventional as a filmmaker of a fantasy films, but even if you did not live in France during the time periods of the films, you still feel connection to the characters shown. Displacement. Barriers between family members or moments where communication doesn't work. Aimlessness and hostility. Never shown in a childishly nihilistic way, but with an honesty of how the world does not seem to work completely while never forgetting the moments of joy or interest in other's minor joys in life.

Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943)
Retuning to this. A beginning, if not the real origin, of American experimental cinema. A dream that managed to be made in a period where the US was involved in World War 2. An alluring dream that yet frightens. A whole wealth of American films, let alone those of David Lynch, seem to have been followers of what this short did. And that one of the most important people who helped experimental cinema thrive in America, who made this film, was a woman, when it feels at times that women are still pushed to the side in cinema as directors, feels like something that needs to be mention in how cinema is a more diverse web of creation than you may view it at times. A short review can be found here.

Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)
It's probably better to just quote the Harry Nilsson song intertwined with this film, but that would neglect that, to actually watch it, rather than to know of it just from its existence in popular culture, is to also experience the drama within it and the finale on a bus. Pop cultural references just talk about a cowboy on a crowded street in New York, or Rizzo, not what lies for the two in having to actually try and survive on their own wits, isolated but together.

Mondo Cinema
(Mondo cane (1962), Africa addio (1966), Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971))
/Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980)
In this year, I ended up exploring one of the most controversial sub-genres in exploitation cinema history. A place said to be xenophobic, racist, nationalist and misogynistic, yet Mondo cane was celebrated by the late J.G. Ballard. The films mentioned above have flaws, of their creators' biases, and the things mocked out for the camera, but they at least were trying to strive to something progressive. Trying to have humanity. Always willing to jab the final blow into their own white, Western culture for its hypocrisy. They are worth the examination even if one has to prepare oneself for their bluntness and animals killed unjustly for the moral message onscreen. How befitting I saw the film that wanted to damn this genre, Cannibal Holocaust, the same year for the first time? Condemning of this genre for humanist sake, but still committing real acts of animal slaughter onscreen, and just as bitter to try and consume like the mondo films. The entire chapter is one of morality being more greyer outside its comfort zone when mere utopian ideals become more contradictory and cynical. A review of Africa Addio can befound here.

Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, 2012)
My first Wes Anderson as an adult. Not the first first, that would be The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)¸but baring David Bowie sung in Portuguese, that film is a vague memory too intangential now to be the proper viewing of this darling of American cinema. To see the humour of this film, its warmth, its striking use of cinematic space and camera movements, use of music and playfulness was for me a delight. There was a director, now I've finally gotten around to him, who may be the auteur who could be completely relied on to make interesting films of worth each time he appears. I saw the trailer for The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) at the cinema, and having already laughed my socks off at it, and marvelled in the wit and visual technicality shown in it, in just a compilation of sizzle moments, I'm like an excitable kid for a director for the first time in a long while.

Music Land (Wilfred Jackson, 1935)
Thus proof jazz and classical music, let alone any other music genre, can be appreciated together rather than dismissing one for the other. A metaphor for having a diverse taste in a literal battle of musical notes.

My Dad Is 100 Years Old (Guy Maddin, 2005)
"Why is that up there, why is it moving? Stop it! My father would call these camera moves immoral, because they are pretentious and unnecessary. Come down, eye level, centred. In the perfectly simple Rossellini framing. Good."

My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)
The month of January of this year, I started on my way to trying to understand why John Ford is as beloved as he is as a film director. His humanism. That it's actually painful for guns to have to be take out and fired, let alone kill a man. The sense of comradery and universal love. Seeing this film last year was the sign of this side of Ford I had ignored in my immaturity.

My Way Home (Miklós Jancsó, 1965)
Visual rigor meets the aimlessness of a war ground where nothing truly happens of worth in terms of conflict, thus defeating the point of victory on either side. It seems strange that, a few days after the director has passed away, I talk about the first film of his I have seen after ignoring him, along with many other directors, in favour of some pointless viewing choices. I hope to make amends by viewing his work a lot more sooner than the time (and chance) it took to see this one.

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Images from the following sources:

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