Clowns, Cannibals, Convicts and Kings
The back seven of a film-watching odyssey. Two topical children's books and an erotic graphic memoir.
In the last entry I published my notes on the first seven of fourteen films I watched in sequential order of release date. The idea was to watch one movie I’d never seen before from each year ending with a zero from 1890 to 2020. This entry goes from 1960 to 2020.
Jigoku, directed by Nobuo Nakagawa, 1960. Excellent movie with an unusual story and structure in which the first two thirds are effectively contrived to get the protagonist and literally everyone he knows into Hell and manages with economic scripting and consistent pacing to make this outcome feel earned. The last third is a tour through Hell and its various tortures, staged with a well-calibrated balance of deep pathos and abject horror. Most of the movie before the Hell sequences is assembled with haunting chiaroscuro compositions and lighting that look to have been directly inspired by Caravaggio paintings. Whole movie is full of weird, discomfiting images and content. Well-made, engaging, unconventional, and nightmarish film. Highly recommended.
The Clowns, directed by Federico Fellini, 1970. Part mock-documentary and part dreamscape of reminiscence about kinds of clowns, famous clowns and real-life clowns. Quintessentially Felliniesque in its combination of absurdity, memory, grotesquerie, self-mocking metanarrative and uneasy regard for filmmakers as Promethean tricksters and self-indulgent narcissists. This film uses its single topic as a basis both to hold the cavalcade together and to wheel off into episodic riffing. Appears to me to have been a partial influence on Woody Allen's 1987 film Radio Days, which is quite good overall and more entertaining than The Clowns.
Cannibal Holocaust, directed by Ruggero Deodato, 1980. Bracing and inspiring cinema for those who can handle its relentless visual, emotional and spiritual brutality. You can feel the confidence and control of the filmmakers from the opening frames and in the first notes of the disquieting musical score: this is some seriously transgressive, provocative, disgusting, unsettling and offensive shit, packaged in a really well-made B-movie that glues your eyes to the screen and then dares you to tear them away by going to viscerally affecting places mainstream movies never could. Evidently a direct influence on the much more successful, and much tamer, 1994 film Natural Born Killers and 1999 film The Blair Witch Project, Cannibal Holocaust plays with the found-footage/camera-as-voyeur concept far more effectively and disturbingly than its imitators. The acting is sometimes quite good, especially towards the end when things are really going off the rails. Cannibal Holocaust would be easier to dismiss as pointless provocation if it wasn't so well-executed. I’m situated awkwardly in between my obligation to recommend this as a great movie and to admonish that it is really, really, really not for the faint of heart (or stomach). Do as you will.
Ghost, directed by Jerry Zucker, 1990. One of the dumbest movies I've ever seen, at least as far as successful A-list pictures go. Until the ghost part kicks in, everything in the beginning is very good, including the famously PG-13 pottery-wheel love scene. At first the direction and acting manage to stay cool and confident, but soon painfully dated effects and ridiculous turns in the story and dialogue crop up to murder the viewer's suspension of disbelief. Even Patrick Swayze, such a significant part of what works so well in Dirty Dancing and Point Break, can't resuscitate this predictable, implausible, profoundly bad movie.
Animal Factory, directed by Steve Buscemi, 2000. Buscemi has a small role in the picture and the nominal protagonist is played convincingly by Edward Furlong, but the proceedings belong to Willem Dafoe as a sly convict who pulls strings and rules the roost at the prison where nearly every character in the movie works or resides. This is a gritty slice of life in the typical 2000 indie style with loose, jangly story structure and a dour, realistic atmosphere. Characters thoroughly inhabited by then-little-known actors like Danny Trejo and Chris Bauer struggle and abide without much need for backstory or development. The movie succeeds without overly exerting itself on the strength of Dafoe's predatory performance and John Lurie's low-key, simmering musical score.
Caterpillar, directed by Koji Wakamatsu, 2010. A domestic drama nested within an antiwar social comment that has a TV-movie feel but mounts an impressively watchable production on limited resources. A combat veteran in 1930s Japan who has lost all of his limbs and his ability to speak returns to his village where his wife experiences pressure from the community to set an example not only through the trial of caring for him but by enduring it with a public-facing mask of pride and contentment. The technicians deploy a muted color palette and unshowy sense of composition and movement to stay out of the way of the fine lead performances which anchor the story. An involving, moving, sad and well-performed movie that demonstrates how a proud warrior culture can make pitiable victims of its most venerated heroes. Worth the short amount of time it takes to watch.
Tenet, directed by Christopher Nolan, 2020. Has all of the hallmarks of every movie (with the exception of Dunkirk) that Nolan has made after The Dark Knight.
Great look.
Solid casting and acting.
Excellent musical score which probably holds up well on its own.
Action sequences that are mostly really cool and often incomprehensible.
Extraneous characters.
Paragraphs of risible expository dialogue, which is an over-correction for…
…a hard-to-follow plot.
Bloated length.
Smug, treacly ending.
The three random selections from my reading list for this entry’s round of Roulette turned up some noteworthy titles, two of them from authors I’ve mentioned in previous entries.
The Sneetches and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss, read in 2015. Justly remembered as a crowning achievement from one of the best and most well-known children’s book authors. The title story, with a message about in-group bias and the resulting sense of discriminatory superiority, remains urgent nearly seven decades after publication. As I mentioned previously, I’ve always loved Dr. Seuss’s work, and this book, which contains three other stories pointing to the necessity of cooperation, common sense and self-reliance, is one of his most insightful and all-around best.
King & King by Linda de Haan & Stern Nijland, read in 2019. This Dutch children’s book, which I read in its English translation, engendered controversy for having broken new ground early in the third millennium by reorienting an archetypal royal fairytale to be about a gay prince who wants to find a male partner to marry. Charmingly well-written and has a good message; it’s only the illustrations that don’t click for me. They are executed in a crude collage style that is meant to look outsidery but feels amateurish.
Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York written by Samuel R. Delany and illustrated by Mia Wolff, read in 2018. Continuing with the theme of gay love. This is a graphic memoir about how Delany, a highly-regarded writer of science fiction and erotica who happens to have been one of my writing teachers when I was a university student, got into an enduring and loving relationship with a homeless man in New York City. I noted in another entry that early in 2021 I was reading a Delany novel called Out of the Dead City, and I still plan to one day lay siege to Dhalgren, said by some to be his best, but legendarily dense and challenging. Interesting to engage with a comic book written by a guy who is much more famous as a prose writer. The writing and story are good but the art style not to my taste; Wolff’s level of skill doesn’t seem right for this project and she has trouble carrying across the weight of Delany’s deep personal remembrances.