Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)

Kramer vs. Kramer deeply troubled us.

Ostensibly a liberal film from the late 70s, about a New York City couple undergoing a painful divorce and custody battle, it ended up being insidiously sexist. How did it win so many accolades back in the day? Were people really so blind? Was this meager bone tossed to women, with its MARROW OF SEXISM (ahem), really meant to be progressive?! Come on! While it was nominally about the women's lib movement, it was basically about how that movement could become a vehicle for one man to become closer and more emotionally open with his son. The women in the film (of which there are two - and, no, they don't talk to each other) are sidelined, their women's lib movement regularly mocked. The finale seems to say: after emancipation, there's no place for women.

Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) is a young, upwardly mobile New Yorker. On a day when everything in his professional life is going great, his personal life falls apart: he comes home to find his wife, Joanna Kramer (Meryl Streep), with a packed suitcase. Without much explanation, she walks out - and leaves him to care for their rambunctious, adorable 5-year old son, Billy (Justin Henry). The film then becomes essentially a father-son buddy film, as Ted learns to juggle work and homelife.

Numerous social threads are woven throughout: Ted cites feminism as the cause of his wife's antics, he has trouble performing against "all the other mothers" at PTA meetings or play-dates, and his office is basically intolerant of anything less than "110%". Big client, you know.

Of course, Ted stumbles and bumbles, but eventually emerges triumphant. And it's very much at the expense of, well, women and women's issues: Joanna is villainized, even in Meryl's capable hands, and she's presented as a trembley, flakey cipher with only one setting: timid, borrowed rebellion. It's really painful to watch.

(We also couldn't stand Ted (and that's saying something, since we normally appreciate Dustin Hoffman): his violent outbursts seemed waaay too normalized, as if calling your kid a "little piece of shit" or throwing a wine glass past your ex-wife's head are somehow understandable moments of weakness rather than, well, crossing an important line. Dude just seemed like an abusive asshole, to put it bluntly.)

It's interesting to compare this film to another period divorce, The Squid and the Whale. That film's tortuously-divorcing parents were well-rounded, understandable people. They were weak - and Jeff Daniels's Bernard was perhaps more bluntly odious than Dustin Hoffman's Ted - but one could still sympathize. The Kramers, unfortunately, just felt like straw people in a straw world.

Doctor Who: Midnight (2008)

Some mood music, while you read.

We at the PPCC are huge sci-fi nerds, and yet it has taken us a long (loooong) time to get into that one mighty pillar of sci-fi-ness, Britain's Doctor Who of Britain, starring Britain, co-starring Britishness. Okay, we tease, but, damn, that shit is nationalistic! Which is fine. Most spec fic is notoriously US-centric, after all. Anyway, we're glad we finally initiated ourself. In addition to being nationalistic like crazy sauce, it is also addictive and silly and fun and full of everything.

It's difficult to review a PILLAR, so instead we'll focus on a few things:

• The episode, Midnight, and how it's awesome and a good intro. (Review)
  
• Some Doctor Who themes, and how they run the gamut from awesome to stupid to huh-ness. (Thoughts)

Allons-y, then!  

Episode review: Midnight

Doctor Who episodes seem to come in three varieties:

• Really trashy, ridiculous, and occasionally awful one-off episodes, featuring a Monster of the Week. As some of our friends assured us, "You do know it's a kid's show, right?" (No, we didn't! But now we do. Oh, how we do.)
  
• Really spectacular, mind-bending one-offs.
  
• Mediocre-to-good episodes that are usually redeemed by giving us one more crumb along the Great Path of Understanding the Doctor, usually accompanied by a Great Emotional Moment for the Doctor as well. These are exciting.

Midnight falls into the secondary category. It's the perfect gateway episode; you can watch it while knowing nothing of the Doctor and his Interminable Journey. But, of course, the experience is much richer if you do know a bit, since Midnight takes several Doctory themes, and then subverts them in refreshing ways.

Midnight begins on a fancy, diamondy planet called, uh, Midnight. Which is ironic, since it is brilliant and sparkling and very, very sunny. It is also totally hostile to any form of life; the sun being "x-tonic", which is technobabble for "zapping killer laser beam-like". The Doctor (David Tennant) and his Companion, the wonderful Donna Noble (the wonderful Catherine Tate), are taking a (much-deserved) break on Midnight, which markets itself as a party planet. The Doctor decides to go on a nature tour, while Donna lounges by the pool.

On the nature tour, we're introduced to a variety of Typical Human People: there's the suburban couple (Daniel Ryan, Lyndsay Coulsen) and their sullen teen son (Colin Morgan), the bumbling professor (David Troughton) and his geeky assistant (Ayesha Antoine), the flight attendant (Rakie Ayola; called a "hostess" in the episode, since apparently it's also 1950), and a middle-aged divorcee (Lesley Sharp). After lampooning modern commercial flight (endless, chattering entertainment options, tiny peanut packets, and so on), the journey is underway. The Doctor makes a few friends, people joke, and obviously something horrible is looming on the horizon.

We won't give away the horribleness, because much of the episode's genius is the smart and inventive (and cheaply-produced!) monster that we meet. If it's a monster at all. But it's something straight out of The Twilight Zone or Hitchcock: the fear and tension is slow, subtle, and gripping. One subversion of the Doctor Who routine is that the Doctor is as ignorant as everyone else on the ship (and in the audience) as to what the It thing is. Nothing is supposed to live on Midnight, and yet it seems something has? (Note that we can't even conclusively say that something has. One lovely interpretation of the episode is that there was nothing there at all, and everyone just freaked themselves out.)

A second subversion of Doctor Who's usual stuff is that, for once, humanity isn't celebrated, but instead retreats immediately into the banality of evil. When confronted with something difficult to understand and potentially violent, the passengers become scary and bestial themselves. It's reminiscent of J.G. Ballard's comments on seeing the "ragged scaffolding" of suburban civilization strip away, and how rattling that can be. For Doctor Who fans and the Doctor himself, it's especially rattling: usually, humanity has a big ol' crush on the Doctor, and is always happy to be helped. Here, they're skeptical, paranoid, hostile.

Anyway, the craft in this episode is just brilliant. The dialogue: building up tension, revealing aspects of the It thing's otherness slowly, taking sudden turns. Argh, as a writer, the PPCC burned with jealousy at someone having had such a good idea! The music. The acting: Tennant is always pretty damn good, but his role-reversal during the climax was so well-done. As with Lesley Sharp, especially in the earlier moments of being possessed, when she's/it's "learning". Ah! So good. Bravi, bravi.  

Big thoughts  

First big thought: Doctor Who is Buddhism

In fact, it might be as Buddhist as Groundhog Day, and that's pretty damn Buddhist. Except, whereas Groundhog Day is uplifting because it shows us nirvana (the ultimate happy ending), Doctor Who just grounds the PPCC down with its nihilistic woe. Seriously, how can this be a kid's show? HOW?! It is misery by design.

The most obvious Buddhist links are, first, the regeneration, and, second, the eternal woe. Oh, the woe.

One of the central tenets of Buddhism is that life is suffering, and it tends to repeat again and again, until we can break out of it by building mindfulness and compassion and non-attachment. Once you break out of that cycle of life and rebirth, you turn into Bill Murray - i.e. a Buddha, an enlightened being. In Mahayana Buddhism, there's an intermediate stage, called a bodhisattva - that's someone who delays nirvana, staying amongst the merely-stuck to teach about loving-kindness and being all nice and stuff.

You could argue that the Doctor's a bodhisattva. But we wouldn't. Because while he is pretty helpful and sorta nice and all that, he's also fighting the same battles over and over again: those Daleks never seem to die, do they? Nor does the (wonderful) Master (nor should he!).

Similarly, you'd think the Doctor would have learned, by now, that attachment leads to suffering (second Noble Truth in the ol' Buddhism). But he doesn't - constantly seeking out Companions, and constantly, ahem, effing them over. They never seem to emerge unscathed from their adventures. Seriously, after you've lost various Companions to death, dismemberment and being locked in a parallel universe, JUST STOP, DUDE.

So, it's Buddhism, but it's Buddhism at its saddest: the moment after the First and Second Noble Truths (life sucks, and the sucking will go on forever), and before the Third and Fourth (wait, maybe I should stop all this). To use a Christian analogy, it's like modeling a story on the moment after Jesus dies, but before he's resurrected. It's just miserable, dude.

 IS THIS WHAT YOU TEACH YOUR CHILDREN, BRITAIN?!

Which brings us to the second big thought.  

Second big thought: Doctor Who is Nationalism

 "Oh no," someone gasps. "They're headed towards Earth!"

Cut to outline of the UK.

The ostensible backstory is that the Doctor loves Earth like peanut butter loves jam. And that's fine. But Earth is basically Britain. And not only that - it's England. Scottish David Tennant wasn't allowed to keep his Scottish accent because, of all the regenerations a rogue Time Lord could make, of all the species, the genders, the heights and the everythings, the dude's gotta be a white English male every. single. time. Rumor has it the newest Doc, Peter Capaldi, will be retaining his Scottish accent, but this was - apparently - a major BBC decision.

Sometimes, the nationalism stuff is grating. But we know that we have no leg to stand on; most sci-fi is heavily skewed towards the US, and few people even seem to notice. At other times, the nationalism stuff is hilarious and wonderful, such as when an ailing Doctor - remember, this guy's a magical, super-smart, self-healing, time-traveling alien - is on the brink of death and then healed by the power of a CUP OF TEA. (Seriously, that was brilliant.)

Another wonderful byproduct of the Who's nationalism, is its portrayal of workaday Normal British Folk in all the supporting characters: Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), the London shopkeeper. Donna Noble, who's "just a temp from Chiswick!" And their funny families! Everyone is pretty modest, even mediocre. What's nice about the show is that it celebrates this normality for the inherent brilliance it can conceal.

Third big thought: Doctor Who is fandom

Fandom is nice. Fandom is fun. And Doctor Who has a huge, gigantic, long-lived fandom that seems to go on and on in every direction, and rival the Trekkies in terms of historicity and population density. Many of our good friends are Whovians. Some of the latest Doctors themselves - Tennant and Capaldi - are Whovians. And then you've got things like Adventure Time fans and fun, smart YouTube channel fans, and references all over the place. And the fanfiction! Oh, the fanfiction. We don't even want to go there.

For whatever reason (we still haven't pinpointed it), this miserable, lonely Time Lord has captured everyone and their mom's attention - including ours. The PPCC has basically put everything on hold while we finished off the Tennant years. And now we've still got all of Matt Smith to go - oh God.

There's still so much to say - how Doctor Who compares to Star Trek, especially The Next Generation, since we do think they are two sides of the same (weird) coin. Or the weird moments of transcendental, pulpy space opera in Who - especially when they talk about the Time War (and it sounds like the line-up for a heavy metal festival, "the Could-Have-Been King and his army of Meanwhiles and Never-Weres!"). But we'll leave that to another day, as it's 1AM here and a Time Lord has just regenerated in our laptop!

Allonsanfàn (1974)

Allonsanfàn is a wry, strange look at the absurd tragedy of radical Italians. It technically takes place in the early 19th century, but it could be just as home in the 1860s, 1920s or 1970s. In fact, especially the 1970s - a decade in which domestic terrorism killed Aldo Moro and laid bombs in Bologna's train station. A decade where the idealism of 1968 had ripened into a hyper-violent, extreme nihilism (both on the Left and the Right), where killing became a currency of discourse. (Thanks, Paul Ginsborg, by the way, for teaching the PPCC about modern Italian history! Seriously, readership, A History of Contemporary Italy is wonderful.)

Anyway, in Allonsanfàn, we follow a disillusioned, weary and aging radical, Fulvio Imbrani (Marcello Mastroianni), as he repeatedly tries (and fails) to extricate himself form his former revolutionary life. This is often to grotesque or comedic results (such as when he makes a suicide pact with one fellow comrade, only to let the other guy go first), though - as is the usual style of 1970s commedie all'italiana - it's also very sad, beneath everything. The aristocratic Fulvio stumbles out of prison one day, feverish and exhausted, narrowly avoiding a grim fate at the hands of the state. His revolutionary comrades likewise almost behead him, thinking he had spilled all their secrets. When this is proved false, he is left to mend in the comfort of his big fancy bed in his big fancy mansion. And big fancy mansions - they are hard to say no to.

Indeed, Fulvio's ideals - which were already a little brittle - now crumble under the weight of this material comfort. Of course, this gnaws at him - aren't those big fancy chandeliers just symbols of oppression? And his poor nanny, still making his bed and doing back-breaking agricultural labor outside? Fulvio's strength of opinion, though, has been broken out of him. Or maybe he's just tired of being indignant and sure of everything, because he proceeds to embark in a misguided, frequently half-assed adventure to cut his old ties. We found ourselves snickering, sometimes with disgust, sometimes with glee, at Fulvio's silliness, selfishness and pitiable state - and we found ourselves constantly grafting this story onto the wider meaning of 1970s Italian politics, messy and unfortunate as they were. "How can we live in this world?" one earnest revolutionary laments. "When everyone seems asleep, and we're the only ones who seem to have woken up?" It's a sad, slightly delusional statement, and Fulvio's in the unfortunate position of recognizing the idealists' misguided attempts to (for example) free the Southern peasants, while not having the courage or ability (or good luck!) to get free of their grasp. He's made his bed, and now he's going to LIE IN IT, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

Allonsanfàn himself turns out to be a character, a young revolutionary (Stanko Molnar), who is the most dedicated, the grimmest, and, ultimately, the most delusional. A stand-in for the young, violent Red Brigades? Allonsanfàn is also, oddly, named after the first two words of La Marseillaise ("Wake up, children!") - indeed, the strains of revolutionary France are an important reference for the revolutionaries of this film. (In the way that the Paris Commune inspired the 1968 Italian idealists?)

Marcello Mastroianni is, as usual, wonderful in this, aging charmer that he is. Indeed, he channels that same world-weariness that we saw in Una giornata particolare, as well as the sense of a man trapped in an almost Kafka-esque surrealist nightmare, much like his role as the doomed bricklayer from Dramma della gelosia. The music by Ennio Morricone, particularly the theme of the revolution, was also incredibly catchy and wonderful: this scene, where an embittered Fulvio meditates on his former comrades, was just wonderful. "I've healed. I've changed." Brrr, lovely!

Pane e cioccolata (1974)

The popular Italian classic, Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate), is incredibly uneven. But it occasionally works as a weird, tragically farcical Odyssean tale of one Italian immigrant's misadventures in a cold, uncaring Switzerland.

Its gags are hit and miss, and its tone veers around a little wildly: in the opening ten minutes, we witness some social satire, some slapstick, and then a murdered child. It sounds strange, and, in the hands of a ballsy director like Lina Wertmuller, it might have worked as a sort of chaotic, provocative, politicized film. But director Franco Brusati is much tamer in comparison, and his aesthetics just feel sort of muddled and indistinct. Mostly, it just felt like a slightly maudlin proclamation for the inherent tragedy of immigrant lives. Yes, it's sad. But… huh? How are we supposed to feel about a ribald-turned-depressed drag show?


The immigrant.

Nino (Nino Manfredi) is a southern Italian immigrant making his way as a waiter in a posh Swiss restaurant. At night, he yearns for his family back in Italy - but his pride won't let him return, and his wallet won't let him bring them up to be Swissified (his ultimate wish).

The Swiss setting, meanwhile, is cold, uncaring, and fundamentally hypocritical: the lawns may be perfect, the etiquette air-tight, but there are dead kids in the bushes and stolen fish in the toilet bowl. Even the immigrant success stories - such as the ruthless millionaire who briefly employs Nino - end in embezzlement and suicide.

After getting fired from the restaurant, Nino faces trial after trial - and his problems just get more and more surreal. In a way, the film improves with this surreality, because that's when it makes its point most brazenly: for example, at one point, Nino ends up huddled in a chicken coop with a family of half-crazed, stunted, ignorant Italian immigrants. This madhouse increasingly appalls Nino until, exasperated, he says, "Look at us. You're Italian. I'm Italian. Does that mean we have anything in common?" The family shushes him and runs to the chicken wire window. "Look!" He joins them, and, all crouched and huddled together, the Italians watch through the chicken wire as a troup of young, naked, Aryan supermodels frolic through an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. The way this scene is directed - with lingering, objectifying shots of perfect blond hair glittering in the sunlight, and soft pink flesh - is just wonderful. It's scathing, hilarious, surreal and awful - very Lina Wertmuller! The next sequence, which opens with Nino having dyed his hair blond, is just as painful and wonderful. Indeed, the last twenty minutes of this film are uncharacteristically pitch perfect: it makes its point and hammers it home. Too bad the rest of the film wasn't like that!


Frolicking Aryans...


"Look how beautiful they are."

Our previously reviewed Café Express is indeed a spiritual sequel to this, covering much the same territory of Italian pessimism and decrepitude, embodied in the aging, tired Nino Manfredi and his sorrowful smiles. We don't know if we'd necessarily recommend these films, though, neither for their social point (which was better made by, for example, Wertmuller's Mimi metallurgico ferito nell'onore) nor for Nino Manfrediness (which is better enjoyed in C'eravamo tanto amati).

In nome del papa re (1977)

In nome del papa re (In the name of the Pope-king, though it could also be In the name of the father-king) is a fraught, strange, charming film. It's also a breath of fresh air in its portrayal of the clergy - long stereotyped as corrupt pedophiles or one-dimensional bigots. Quite the contrary, In nome del papa re's worn, frazzled anti-hero, Monsignor Colombo (a wonderful, as always, Nino Manfredi), seems more like an ancestor to the partisan-priests of WW2 neorealism than anything else. His tangled, unfortunate position - as reluctant collaborator to a reactionary Papacy, as reluctant father to an arrested revolutionary - is wonderfully charged, tragic and bizarre. His mannerisms also - cigar-chewing, Roman-slanging - recall the tinted glasses, smoldering cigarette and whiskey tumblers of the old SNL character, Father Guido Sarducci. In other words, the PPCC loves him and would totally go all Catholic for him. "What do you want from me?" Colombo demands, impatient. "A benediction? Want me to give you a benediction? You'll have to make it last!"


In the name of the Father (and father)...


...and son...


...and the Holy Spirit (of revolutionary Italia!).

But enough of priests, let's get to the plot. The year is 1867, and Rome is in full-on Risorgimento-style turmoil. (For those that don't know, Italy was created in 1861. The period of unification is called the Risorgimento, and featured a lot of bloody conquering of the various kingdoms and principalities - principal among them, of course, being the Papacy and its repressive reign over Rome.) Bombs are falling, Italian revolutionaries are hiding in the houses of the sympathetic bourgeois or getting their heads chopped off, and Monsignor Colombo (Nino Manfredi) is drafting his resignation letter as a Papal judge. "I just want to be a priest," he laments. "Which is hard enough, as it is." In other words, the good monsignor's lost faith in the Papacy's legitimacy as a secular authority. He's basically a closet Garibaldista, even though he won't admit it to himself. (Garibaldi being the general who led the armies which unified Italy.)

Meanwhile, across town, three revolutionary youths - among them the stormy, arrogant Cesarino (Danilo Mattei) - have learned that they're to be arrested and beheaded by the Papacy, following a terrorist bomb they (or someone) left under a barracks (killing dozens of Vatican soldiers). Cesarino's mother, the well-to-do gentlelady, the Countess Flaminia (Carmen Scarpitta), despairs - and flies immediately to Monsignor Colombo's house. And there she lays the bomb (no pun intended) of the Bestest Plot Device Ever on him: "Now you have two reasons to save him. One, because he's my son. And, two, because he's also yours."

Ah, yes. Yes, back in those heady, halcyon days of 1849, amid musket fire and the clash of armies, when the Vatican's foundations first shook under Garibaldi's assault, as she tended the wounded and he administered last rites to the dying, and they were so tired, and all they needed was a warm bed, and so on and so forth. Okay, we actually found that whole idea very romantic. But then, disrobing priests while battles rage around us in Garibaldi-era Rome - mm mmm!


One of the most badass scenes: the mother of one of the other condemned revolutionaries confronts Colombo. "You saved your son. You didn't save mine." When he tries to give her the Holy Communion, she leans back, "No. Not from you." BAM! Go, lady!

Anyway. Monsignor Colombo is clearly in a bind now, and the schmaltzy music which forever hounds his brooding bluntly announces the heartbreaking choices he must make. HEARTBREAKING, in case that's not clear. VIOLINS MUST BE PLAYED. How will he get Cesarino out of the clink? When guillotines fall with such ease, and "there are spies everywhere", and Cesarino announces that there are two things he hates in this world: "Absent fathers, and priests!" What's a guy to do?

The film is most effective when it's not REALLY ALL CAPS BLUNT - and certain schmaltzy moments could have been lessened if only the music track had been changed. But we can't complain. We even loved the soap opery final plot twist, if only because the lovely Nino Manfredi underscored everything so well with his restrained, effective performance. Manfredi's schtick - as he did so well in C'eravamo tanto amati - is the easy-going, sarcastic, vulnerable Roman with a heart o' gold. He lays that down as his main melody, and basically improvises around it - in this performance, peppering Said Roman with telling moments of weariness, worry and grief. Never is he explicit in these things, everything is turned into a joke. It's like his protective exoskeleton. And, of course, that makes it all the more touching. An example: one of the most poignant scenes is when his servant, a grizzled, Obelix-ish Serafino (Carlo Bagno), comes downstairs at dawn to find him sleeping, collar askew, at his desk. As Colombo grumbles himself awake, clearly exhausted, he laments the night before: freeing Cesarino, but not the other two revolutionaries, and thus doing a pretty half-assed good deed. As he hunkers down to eat his breakfast, he sees bite marks in it. "Did you eat this?" Serafino is aghast: "You think I'm giving you my leftovers? It must be the rats in the kitchen, they must have got to the pantry by now and given it a nibble." And Manfredi just looks at him, looks at the biscuit, eats, and then sighs, "They're God's creatures." Ha! Okay, maybe you had to be there.


Ah, 1860s Rome! Is that Trastevere that my eye detects?


Don't legitimize a false authority!

What's interesting about this film - a tame example of a 1970s Italian film, despite all the sexytimes on and off screen, with and without priests - is how, yet again, political engagement is portrayed as complicated, messy and doomed. We saw this in Lina Wertmuller's incredible Love and Anarchy, a film which explored a would-be assassin of Mussolini in the days before the deed. Both films, which follow the "good" guys (pro-Unification priests, anti-Fascist anarchists), essentially end badly. It's very sad. And both films offer an apologetic coda, promising the good things that actually did occur to those movements post-movie timeline: i.e. the eventual unification of Italy and demise of Papal power; the eventual liberation of Italy by the Americans in 1945, and the death of Fascism. Which makes us wonder. Why are these films, both about real periods and real movements that "won", so pessimistic? Is it just commentary on extreme political activism per se? The inevitable fall of the zealous anarchist/partisan/Garibaldista? Hm.

PPCC + Masala Zindabad podcast = Shashi Kapoor

PPCC readership - especially those of you that pine for the days of a Hindi-saturated PPCC - take a blast from the past and hear the PPCC wax poetic about our three favorite topics (Shashi, feminism and Shashi) on Beth and Amrita's excellent podcast, Masala Zindabad:


click on the shashi for podcast fun!

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, as with many classics, is reliably well-done. In fact, so perfect is its execution that it was almost too perfect - like a Kenneth Branagh movie, where everything exhibits a glowing, slightly alienating polish.

Which is not to say this is a pretty film. Instead, like many films of the 70s (what is it about this era, btw? GENIUS was in the air, in India, Italy and the US), it is gritty, totally up our alley and ultimately very sad. It feels, in many scenes, like the other American classics of that era: Easy Rider, MASH (the movie), Bonnie and Clyde… That is, scenes drift over naturalistic conversations; the setting is rough, the characters misfits; and there is an underlying, cynical sense of humanity getting crushed under near-dystopian circumstances. The 70s were, after all, the "Emergency" period in India, the "lead years" in Italy and the OPEC crisis for everyone in the world.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest begins with one typical protagonist of the times: petty criminal R.P. McMurphy (a young, electric Jack Nicholson) who tries to con his way out of a work camp by joining an insane asylum. (Much like Pasqualino Settebellezze!) What McMurphy finds in the asylum, though, is a soul-crushing, dehumanizing atmosphere where the obviously vulnerable are regularly humiliated and everyone is too traumatized to speak up about it. It all feels very grandly symbolic about the dangers of too much civilization (McMurphy being the obvious free spirit/libertarian stand-in) or the banality of evil (especially via collaboration! lots of gut-wrenching shots of characters looking at each other for help, and being unable to give any!).

The motley crew of "lunatics" are the clear ancestors of characters like those in The Dream Team or Awakenings or that one season premiere of House (where they basically grafted this movie scene for scene) or, well, many other Hollywood films featuring mental illness. There's the hot-headed Taber (a very young Christopher Lloyd!), the stuttering lamb-like Billy Bibbit (an incredibly young Brad Dourif! continue singing his praises!), the vacantly smiling Martini (an unrecognizably young Danny DeVito), the AWESOME and anxious Cheswick (Sydney Lassick), and the stiff, enigmatic Harding (William Redfield). And then, of course, there's the embodiment of pure evil: Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). The film, which begins as a meandering pastiche about the highs and lows of the asylum inmates, soon evolves into a war of attrition between Good (McMurphy) and Evil (Nurse Ratched). And, need we remind you again, it's the 70s. You can guess how it all goes down.

Jack Nicholson's performance is a charismatic, iconic one: he is heroic in an almost mythical sense, with the added quirkiness of his jackal-like grin and rascally humor. Everyone else is very strong too; with William Redfield and Sydney Lassick being especially compelling, and Brad Dourif hitting the perfect pitch as the shy Billy, all wrapped up in himself. And that hair! How tender and enormous and adorable.

Ken Kesey, who wrote the book on which the film is based, apparently sued the filmmakers and refused to see the film (so said our in-flight entertainment trivia box). We don't know how this compares with the book, but what could Mr. Kesey have to complain about? It's a near-perfect film! "Near" only because, as usual, it hates women: shrewish virgins (Nurse Ratched) combat whores (Jack's friends) for control and attention of men's manlinesses. BIG SIGH OF TIRESOME DISAPPOINTMENT.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

Beneath the Planet of the Apes is slow going at first, but it picks up by the end, eventually letting its story careen away into madness and chaos and Charlton Heston once again on his knees, shouting "Oh, the humanity!" Which is to say: it gets a lot better.

We return to the titular planet only moments after the original left off: "Damn you all to hell!" Taylor (Charlton Heston) cries, on his knees, beating at the sandy beach. Not long later, Taylor and his mute ladyfriend, Nova (Linda Harrison), encounter all manner of strange things in the so-called "Forbidden Zone", a desert wasteland where none dare go. Taylor and Nova dare, and are met with random walls of fire, sudden spurts of pesky lightning, and Land Before Time-esque splits in the earth. When they come upon a rocky outcropping, Taylor walks into it and vanishes.

Meanwhile, astronaut Brent (a tanned, macho James Franciscus) has crash-landed on the Planet in search of the missing Taylor. After coming upon a distressed Nova - okay, admittedly she's always distressed - he hops on Taylor's horse and goes through much of the same terrain (pun intended) we covered in the original: the stumbling upon ape civilization (yay Cornelius! yay Zera! yay sympathetic chimpanzees!), the numerous (and now dull) scenes of flight and capture, the paper-thin allegory to a segregationist, racist society of the 1960s on the verge of social revolution, with gorillas standing in for military hawks/goons, orangutans as the Christian Right and chimpanzees as the intelligentsia.

Things really pick up when Brent eventually finds his way to the title: beneath the Planet. Here, we find remnants of a post-nuclear Manhattan, complete with a crumbling (but intact) subway system and a sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-creepy cult of humans who worship the last, remaining (?) atomic bomb. The plot now starts coming fast and thick, with a conclusion that is as jarring as it is pulpy and paranoid.

This sequel to the 1968 hit is a much paler copy of the original, though it does have its moments. Cocooned in the flash and spectacle of a Saturday sci-fi matinee (George Lucas must be proud!), there were also some very dark scenes of terror and doomsday paranoia. These punctuating bass notes were unexpected, powerful and not altogether welcome to us (especially since we were eating at the time): the ape army coming upon a mirage of their deity on fire, weeping blood, surrounded by apes crucified upside down. The sweaty, desperate, humiliating Spartacus-style fight between mind-controlled Taylor and Brent, for the amusement of the freaky human cult. The freaky human cult, and their freaky Anglican-style service from hell. And the masks! Oh God, the masks!

Profumo di donna (1974)

Profumo di donna (Scent of a woman) is a darker, crueler version of the later Americanized adaptation starring Al "HOOAH!" Pacino.

This version - the original - stars Vittorio Gassman as the blind Captain Fausto, a lecherous old goat who travels down the length of the Italian boot, drinking from his flask, heckling his minion - the resentful, boyish Giovanni (Alessandro Momo) - and sniffing the air in search of a "tall blonde with a big ass". While Giovanni huffs and sighs, Captain Fausto wields his cane like a weapon - slashing the air for obstacles or, well, passersby. As Giovanni creeps under Fausto's nose and discovers a pistol and the photo of a girl (Agostina Belli) in the latter's suitcase, their journey down to Naples begins to take on a new, ominous meaning.

While that strange combination of tenderness and raunchiness - "You think I miss seeing the Sistine Chapel?" Fausto shouts. "A big ass! That's what I miss!" - is still present in the Italian version, as is its slightly maudlin conclusion, this version also boasts a much thornier, less likable blind captain and a much frostier relationship between him and Giovanni. The relatively prudish American version - with Al Pacino as the Captain Fausto (now "Frank") and Chris O'Donnell as the Giovanni (now "Charlie") - emphasized the captain's disability as a strange sort of wild wisdom. Through Al Pacino's "HOOAH!"-ing, his classy tango dancing (just to compare, the same scene in the Italian version had Fausto tongue kissing Giovanni's girlfriend and calling her a "whore") and his general vitality, the anemic preppie Chris O'Donnell learns via the rascally blind man to live life to the fullest. Blah blah.

Fausto's quality of societal jester - i.e. his disability places him outside of society's "norm" bounds, and so he is free to break rules and thereby comment on them - is much harsher. And indeed, his hypersexuality, heavy drinking and unvarnished cruelty (think House) seem more like the desperate acts of a very angry man rather than the gentle insights into "really seeing" the world around you. That's not to say the Italian Fausto is any less a Trungpa Rinpoche-style holy fool than the American Frank. Indeed, there's a stunning scene when Fausto asks his priest cousin to bless him - his cousin then admits that he actually envies Fausto his blindness, since that "constant suffering" affords him special status in the eyes of God. He likens him to "the stupid, the ill, the innocent children".

Kind of patronizing, we thought. And kind of interesting, since the entire movie builds up this holy (tom) foolery and then offers that foolery's pearl of wisdom: that life is essentially meaningless suffering, whether you can see or not. Rather than rebelling against that suffering, once Fausto resigns himself to his complete vulnerability (emphasized ghoulishly via a clumsy, exaggerated fall) does he seem to get peace. He stops resisting. (And remember that Faust is the guy who, for ambition and knowledge and worldly stuff, exchanged any chance of everlasting peace with the devil. So this sentimental finale basically unFausts Faust.) Frank's message (apart from "HOOAH!"; did we mention we love that phrase? HOOAH!) seems to be much less existential nothingness and much more "Carpe diem!". Much less Italian, much more American.

Vittorio Gassman disappeared into this role; we could barely recognize him going all Dionysian and such when we knew him so well as a fallen bourgeois. Alessandro Momo and Agostina Belli didn't really register, both were too generically young and pretty. The priest cousin - whoever that actor was - did a great job, but he also had a great scene. Director Dino Risi used light interestingly; often blinding us or filming things in deep shade or at twilight. Great commentary on Italian regionalism, as always (the first scene in Rome has a moped driver scoot by screaming the stereotypical local slang, "Aoh! Ma va' a mori' ammazzato!" ("Go die in a homicide!")).

I girasoli (1970)

I girasoli (Sunflowers) is one of those epic WW2 love stories that spans decades and several countries. While hinting at stories like Doctor Zhivago, what with the sense of massive European history pulling and pushing lovers together and apart, it's not quite as good - but it is pretty decent. Its triple pedigree - De Sica, Mastroianni, Loren - makes sure that, while not great, it's good.

Early in the war, Neopolitan Giovanna (Sofia Loren) and not-Neopolitan Antonio (Marcello Mastroianni) are lovers on the beach. They decide to get married, since that'll give Antonio - who's convinced he'll soon be sent to the African front - twelve days of delay. "Who knows," Giovanna says brightly. "Maybe the war will be over by then!" Once the twelve days are up, however, the war is far from over (indeed, one of Giovanna and Antonio's honeymoon frolics is interrupted by a bridge-bombing on day 10) - and so they try to make Antonio seem insane. When that doesn't work, they resign themselves to the inevitable: Antonio is sent to the Russian front.

Years pass, the Italian soldiers return, but still no word from Antonio. Yet more years pass - Stalin dies (!), so it's 1953 (!), so (pencil scribbling) that makes it about ten years apart - and Antonio's mother gives him up for dead. But Giovanna, convinced he's still alive, decides to travel to Russia herself, armed only with her steely determination and an ancient wartime photograph of him. What she finds there (which you can probably Google, but we'll endeavor to be at least a little spoiler-free) is sad.

The film is soaked in shared history between Italy and Russia, and the rest of Europe, as both sides pick up the pieces after the war. De Sica emphasizes this common humanity and common heritage by using visual parallels repeatedly throughout the film: the train that Antonio leaves on, the train that brings news of the front, the train that backgrounds their post-war reunion. Antonio's limp, Giovanna's colleague's limp. The near frost-bitten Antonio collapsing in the Russian snow, becoming just one more fallen comrade as the army moves ahead. And, of course, the sunflowers of Russia ("Each sunflower represents someone who died here - an Italian soldier, a Russian soldier, a German soldier, civilians, men, women, children," a character helpfully explains) and the yellow mimosas of southern Italy. Or whatever those flowers are.

Anyway, the point is that this story is supposed to be a drop in a rainstorm: in Giovanna and Antonio's tender heartbreak, we're supposed to see all the thousands of other Giovannas and Antonios that were ripped apart by the war.

Generally, it works. Okay, yes, we cried. But it's not quite as magnificent as it aspires to be. The cinematography is glorious and large - many of the scenes are impressively enormous, capturing rolling fields, thousands of graves, the pristine blue sky. But we were also constantly distracted by De Sica's overenthusiastic use of the dolly. Had he just bought a new one or something? The jumpy zooming and ambitiously long takes (watch for one where a family moves all their furniture in a pick-up truck, and the camera manages to get all the way around the truck while, presumably, both truck and camera car are in motion). A story of this scale also warrants a richness of characterization which is lacking. While Sofia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni are everybody's favorites, and we certainly like them too, we felt that Giovanna and Antonio weren't clearly-enough defined, apart from their love story narrative. The mother-in-law was the barest sketch of a character.

So, all in all, a decently moving large-scale wartime story. Not mind-blowing, but not terrible. Kinda tearjerking. Like, tearnudging.

Love and Anarchy (1973)

Good God. Careful with Film d'amore e d'anarchia, ovvero stamattina alle 10 in via dei Fiori nella nota casa di tolleranza... (A film about love and anarchy, that is, this morning at 10 o'clock in Fiori Street, in the well-known whorehouse...; but more often, Love and Anarchy) - it's intense as hell.

It's also very good, and probably Lina Wertmüller's most gripping, gut-wrenching film. Stripping away all the bizarre humor that lightened and spiced up her later hits, Film d'amore e d'anarchia is a straight, sober look at one of Italy's most terrible periods: the rise of Fascism in the 1920s. We follow a few days in the life of the freckle-faced, wide-eyed country boy, Tonino (Giancarlo Giannini), who has come to the big city with plans to assassinate Mussolini. He's taken in by an anarchist prostitute, Salomè (Mariangela Melato). The whorehouse is a bawdy circus, full of sex jokes and impromptu guitar singing. Tonino, visibly out of his depth, is taken in by the prostitutes, who protect him and bicker over him and mock him. Eventually, he falls in love with the equally young Tripolina (Lina Polito).

But, even amidst this atmosphere of fun and frolic, the clock is ticking. The long shadow of Fascism looms, and things become increasingly edgy as the date of the assassination approaches. This slow crescendo of tension builds and builds, creating a sense of terrible foreboding.

A number of films have shown the quotidian nightmare of Fascist Italy: Una giornata particolare explored the day Mussolini and Hitler met in Rome, as seen via two "outsiders", played by Marcello Mastroianni and Sofia Loren, stranded in a deserted suburban apartment building. Roma città aperta and General della Rovere explored wartime, occupied Italy. Film d'amore e d'anarchia fits neatly into this subgenre, in that - like Una giornata particolare, we experience the city under Fascist rule: and it's alien, ugly, oppressive. We see extensive shots of Mussolini's planned communities, such as EUR, with their enormous, repressive architecture. The streets are all empty. Everyone seems unfriendly and on edge.

Also, like Roma città aperta and General della Rovere, Fascist power seems unconquerable, terrifying. The feeling of initial resistance followed by deep fear ("I'm shitting myself," Tonino repeatedly quails. "You can't imagine how scared I am.") followed by absolute desperation is perfectly captured in these films. Indeed, we spent much of the film anxious and upset, almost unable to watch it to the (inevitable) sorry conclusion. This isn't the post-war world of C'eravamo tanto amati, where the partisan fight - having been won - is suddenly seen as nostalgic and noble. Instead, this is narrow, terrifying insecurity. Indeed, that feeling of pervasive terror lingers - we still feel it now, having just finished the film, and we're reminded of another Antonio, the relatively luckier resistance fighter played by Nino Manfredi in C'eravamo tanto amati, who has a great few lines about it:

Listen, Luciana: when you've risked your life with someone, you remained attached to them. It's as if time doesn't pass, and that person could still save you. As if we're not out of danger yet.

Highly recommended. Follow with the lightest chaser you can find - something like this or maybe this or maybe just a glass of water and a nap.

Dramma della gelosia (1970)

First thing's first: we loved Dramma della gelosia (tutti i particolari in cronaca) (Jealousy drama (with all the details), though its international title was The Pizza Triangle). It was everything we loved about Ettore Scola's other masterpiece, C'eravamo tanto amati, coupled with the zany, sexualized, politicized, over-the-top commedia all'italiana story akin to our favorite Lina Wertmuller movies. In other words, the perfect 1970s Italian film.

The story begins with the fidgety, disheveled Oreste (an amazing Marcello Mastroianni) being asked by the police and lawyers how it exactly happened. Aided by a sad-looking Nello (Giancarlo Giannini), Oreste, Nello and an older man reenact the accidental murder of Adelaide (Monica Vitti) - Oreste and Nello's former lover. There's a bittersweet pageantry to watching everything slow down and seeing the absurdity of this very human drama unfold.

The rest of the film makes us retrace the steps - via Rashomon-like courthouse interjections - of when Adelaide the florist and Oreste the bricklayer met, fell in love, and then met Nello the pizza chef, and fell in love with him too. This love triangle, and the three's extremes of ultimatums, aborted polyamory, attempted suicides and - yes - lots of jealousy and hurt feelings, make up the rest of this strange, touching film. In the vein of Ettore Scola's other PPCCed film, there is a heavy air of surreality (lots of fourth-wall breaking) coupled with compassionate humanism. It all seems so silly and forgivable in hindsight. Also, as per C'eravamo tanto amati and Lina Wertmuller's films, the Italian Left is a prominent supporting character, and the downtrodden, working class Oreste and Nello even meet after getting beat up by the police at a march. Like the bourgeois "padrone" in C'eravamo…, the rich Roman is again portrayed as fat, dull-eyed and very ignorant (played here by the hulking Hércules Cortés).

What was interesting about this film - and called to mind Giancarlo Giannini's later golden years in skeezy picaresque tales like Pasqualino Settebellezze and Mi manda Picone - was its high levels of "zozzeria" - that is, scumminess. The setting is Rome, but the city looks disgusting, and the characters frequent dumps, housing projects and ugly highways. Oreste is hounded by an enormous fly, and his entrances are signaled by loud buzzing. He twitches, his hair is greasy and his clothes are mismatched. In one of the most hilarious scenes, Adelaide attempts to list his pros and cons; when she gets to the cons, she admits, "And you're not very hygienic. Remember that one night? You even made a sound." Oreste and Adelaide meet when he falls asleep on a pile of paper and debris. They frolic on a polluted beach, have a picnic at the dump.

The script successfully juggles tenderness with a sharp wit; we found ourselves laughing often, even if it was so sad. And some of the lines were great! Example: when Adelaide first spots Oreste snoozing on a trash heap at a Communist fair (they have those, I guess?), she hops off the swings and goes to wake him with a kiss. They're both a little drunk and unsteady, and when he wakes, he looks at her, thinks for a bit, and says, "You lost a bet." What a first line! Or a wonderful scene when Adelaide seeks the aid of a therapist: "So what's the diagnosis? I'm traumatized, I've had a shock? It's a neurological disorder? Or am I a whore?" The therapist cuts in quickly: "Let's not get into scientific jargon!"

The most impressive of the cast was Marcello Mastroianni, who was playing heavily against type. We wouldn't have believed that Mastroianni would have been able to shed his dashing, Everyman persona to become someone as decrepit and bizarre (and Roman) as Oreste. The details of his performance - the tic around his eyes; his stubbed, broken fingernails; the general air of decay and hobo-ness - was amazing. In fact, we were so amazed that we had to check if he won anything for this; and he did! Best Actor at Cannes!

Giancarlo Giannini, our other favorite, was also playing heavily against type. Whereas he usually occupied the role of the wild-eyed, unhinged and in love laborer (see Wertmuller's Mimi metallurgico ferrito nell'onore), here he was young, upbeat and oddly tween heartthrob-esque. He was also playing a Tuscan, and the accent was awesome.

Monica Vitti's best moments were definitely the swings between carefree, joyous hedonism and the wracks of self-doubt. In fact, the latter almost seemed satirical of typical soap opera femininity (as was much of this film's treatment of sexual mores and gender norms in general). Yet, as with the writing and everything else, even when things bordered on satirical, they never lacked sympathy.

Highly recommended.

La cagna (1972)

Ugh. What a piece of misogynistic pap.

Other reviews of La cagna (literally, The Bitch, though the international title is Liza) have mentioned it being "highly symbolic" - but surely the director, Marco Ferreri, could have made these same symbolic points using a less rubbish story.

Liza (Catherine Deneuve) and Giorgio (Marcello Mastroianni) are directionless misfits, fleeing from society in an ad hoc, haphazard way. They both end up on a tiny, remote island in the Mediterranean - Liza having swam away from her friend's yacht, Giorgio having established himself as a hermit there with his dog, Melampo. Shortly after Liza's arrival, they "fall in love" - or something, at least. Giorgio then drives Liza back to civilization in his motorboat. Liza then promptly returns, kills Melampo, and takes the dog's place.

There are obvious, striking similarities between this and Lina Wertmuller's far superior Swept Away - the remote island setting, the sadomasochistic love affair, even the actors' looks. But what Wertmuller achieves is a subversion and criticism of La Cagna's central conceit: bourgeois ennui, and how men and women react to it by retreating into primal roles of dominance and submission. Heck, even the uneven Adam Resurrected, which featured a similar nurse/patient, dog/master-roleplaying love affair, was more subtle than this. Both Wertmuller and, to an extent, Adam Resurrected satirized this patriarchal fantasy of "natural"/"savage"/"in the wild" gender roles - La cagna instead embraces them, presenting them as the real thing, as enviable, even.

La cagna also unfortunately relies on lobby room jazz muzak coupled with moody shots of Mastroianni and Deneuve to denote profound philosophical depths. But honestly, Ferreri's not fooling anyone: the characters are paper-thin, the attempts at backstory sloppy and unconvincing ("Ludwig is wrong! No, Ludwig is wrong!" Liza insists - sparing us who Ludwig is or what he's wrong about; the blunt flashback to Melampo as Giorgio crouches over another dead dog - how much more obvious do you need to be? WE GET IT). There's no sense of how much time is passing, no investment in the relationship, and no build and release of dramatic tension. Instead, we trudge along with inane dialogue and, at its worst, tediously stupid gender politics. And those sunglasses! Self-described "Robinson Crusoe" Giorgio springs for Yves Saint Laurent sneakers, but not sunglasses? Oh, come on.

No, we're sorry, but we really don't care about Giorgio's deep guilt over his abandoned, unstable family at home and their bourgeois restrictions on his creativity. Melampo - Pinocchio's dog - may indicate that Giorgio is Pinocchio, but Peter Pan might be more appropriate.

California Split (1974)

California Split should really be called California Existential Vacuum of Woe, but that probably isn't as good a card trick.

An intimate, bleak film, Robert Altman's California Split is the gambling addiction under a microscope. Two serial gamblers, Charlie (Elliott Gould) and Bill (George Segal), meet cute over some low-stakes poker drama and become friends. But, like drinking buddies or heroin buddies or any other type of bad-influence buddies, their raucous, drunken, blazing friendship just makes them spin closer to the abyss that always threatens to consume them. While Charlie lives in a run-down house with two low-level prostitutes, Barbara (Ann Prentiss) and Susan (Gwen Welles), Bill is a yuppie struggling to stay afloat.

Like Altman's other film, MASH, California Split is less about narrative, and more about atmosphere and mood. Here, the mood is grim - almost oppressively so, since there's a facade of 24-hour partying which never honestly admits the deep, psychic cracks that lay beneath the surface. We follow the troupe of four on their picaresque, bohemian adventures - full of chaotic, boozy, grimy locales, dollars flying, the thrill of victory and the crush of defeat. But things just get worse and worse, the stakes climbing ever higher, good humors evaporating, until Charlie finds Bill pawning off all his possessions for one last-chance do-or-die high-stakes gamble in Reno.


Gambling together, beat up together.


Winning and losing togeeether.

Segal really carries the film as Bill's fall is really the most cataclysmic, breaking even Charlie's heart. We didn't realize George Segal (1) ever did drama, (2) ever was young, and so it was a happy surprise to see him young, and delivering such a powerful performance. Elliott Gould was his usual charming, "all cheap and debonair" 1970s persona. And this movie is your pretty standard 1970s American indie about deprivation, depravity and really awesome fashion.

Solyaris (1972)

Like the Bach piece that drifts throughout its titular space station, Solyaris is an austere and beautiful film. Long and slow, we never expected such intensity of feeling, and such narrative clarity, in something so quiet and so thinkerly. An adaptation of the similarly thoughtful novel of the same name by Stanislaw Lem, it manages to capture both the philosophical undertones of man's modest place in the universe, as well as portraying with great sensitivity humanity's microcosmic curse of life, death and love. Like a lot of other Russian stuff (Chekhov, Burnt by the Sun, Shostakovich), this film is greatly in tune with the exquisiteness of suffering, the romance and mysterious beauty of being alive.


Notice the noose.


Noose = loving our children? (Incidentally, this cap taken from a hypnotic, extended ride over Tokyo's flyovers and tunnels. Very Futurism with a capital F.)

In a nondescript future, psychologist and Solaristics researcher, Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), is preparing for his departure to the Solaris space station. This station orbits around the mysterious Solaris planet - a planet which has befuddled scientists for generations and riddled Solaristics with a crappy reputation. No one quite understands the planet; neither its enormous, foggy ocean which seems strangely conscious, nor the fact that everyone who visits the space station becomes a near-suicidal hermit. Kelvin's job is to visit the station, meet the remaining three scientists who live there, and assess whether the entire project should be shut down. Before his departure, he is intercepted by a former pilot, Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky), with tales of strange pseudo-hallucinations coming from the planet-wide oceans: plastic gardens, giant babies, the like. Burton begs the skeptical Kelvin to keep the research alive. Kelvin just thinks he's sad and crazy.


Coming in to land.

When Kelvin arrives at the station, he finds it ill-maintained and eerily empty. One of the three remaining scientists, Dr. Gibarian (Sos Sargsyan), has killed himself and left Kelvin a cryptic video begging him to understand that he did it for the best. The other two scientists, Snaut (Jüri Järvet) and Sartorius (Anatoli Solonitsyn), are likewise disheveled, frazzled and evasive. They get very uncomfortable when Kelvin attempts to enter their quarters, and, just as Snaut is reminding Kelvin to remember that there are only three people on the ship now (you hear me? three! three!), something unseen rustles in Snaut's hammock and a child's ear is glimpsed. And whatever you do, Snaut warns Kelvin, keep your head about you!

Properly shaken, it's not long before Kelvin starts seeing his own apparitions - tinkling bells, a girl's leg - until one day everything solidifies into the form of his deceased wife, Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), sitting bewildered on his couch.


Helping your dead wife out of the dress that she died in? Maybe number 1 on the horrifying scale.

High-quality horror doesn't rely on surprising you or dressing things up in creeping shadows, and, indeed, everything in Solaris is simply and plainly presented. Yet the terrible mystery of these living ghosts, who persistently reappear in the bedroom even after Kelvin shoots Hari into orbit, is truly awful. You spend much of the film like Kelvin: sweating like mad, too terrified to say anything. It is harrying and harrowing, and it's also darkly comic when the three scientists - Kelvin, Snaut, Sartorius - meet up to lament and try to understand their own private hells. Why? How? and WTF? seem to be the major questions. It's clear that the giant planet-ocean is physically manifesting their thoughts, but why? The purpose, while not apparently sinister, is nonetheless frightening just for being so incomprehensible. It is here that the film makes many a powerful comment on the inappropriateness and laughably arrogant ignorance of man's desire to see and understand the cosmos. Understand the cosmos? We can just hear the murky water laughing at you. *bells tinkle*

Unexpectedly (and in a departure from Lem's cerebral novel), a new feeling then creeps into the film, and it becomes an intensely intimate and expressive love story between the guilt-ridden Kelvin and the increasingly self-aware Hari. Tormented astronaut revisited by dead love interest seems a bit hokey and maudlin - if dead wives are going to come back to astronauts, we think the eyeless hellraiser type is much more fun - but it's handled with a beautiful, brooding passion. The credit for this goes as much to director Andrei Tarkovsky as to the actors Donatas Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk. Banionis seems like the love child between Oliver Reed's intensity and Stellan Skarsgard's slouching sexiness, his look of perpetual torment is perfect for this role - if ever someone looked world-weary on an interstellar scale...! Natalya Bondarchuk likewise has a poignant innocence, and the initially vacant creepiness gives way, after self-awareness, to a sad sort of dignity. Kelvin may be the nominal hero, but Hari is the heroic one.


Kelvin and Hari, OTP.

This was an intelligent, often gut-wrenching film. Give yourself a quiet evening at home to watch it, as the pace is unhurried and its full force is best felt when you're matching its leisurely wavelengths. Subtle, powerful, gorgeous. Highly recommended.

Siddhartha (1972)

The prodigal Shashi has returned!

It's Buddhist Film Festival for an Indeterminate Time Period here at the PPCC! So basically, readers, the PPCC was all up in McLeod Ganj recently, soaking in the Buddhist vibes and learning more about Tibetan cuisine culture (okay, side note, but tsampa is like Tibet's gift to the world). While there, we took advantage of engaging in a little DVD buying splurge, and ended up trucking home a number of dharma and quasi-dharma titles - including the one, the only, the long-sought-for, Siddhartha! YES. WE FINALLY HAVE A COPY.

And then there's a thin guy called Siddhartha, who started it all. And it's not 'Sid Arthur' like an East End of London (does accent) "'Ello, Sid Arthur 'ere. Apples and pears, dog and bone, the middle way, that's what I think. Wotcher want? Couple a pound of raspberries? No problem, there you go. Buddhism: take it or leave it."
- Eddie Izzard

WHO IS SIDDHARTHA/THE HISTORICAL BUDDHA? A PPCC CLASSROOM INITIATIVE

First of all: the historical legend of Prince Siddhartha Gautama goes like this: Once 2500 years ago, there was a prince named Siddhartha. He was born and lived in what is now Bihar or Nepal (we're not sure). Anyway, the kingdom was called Kapilavastu. At birth, he was predicted to become either a great king or a great spiritual teacher. Siddhartha's father, Sudhodhana (a great king), was hoping for the great king part. To ensure Siddhartha's great kingliness, he metaphorically locked his son up in a golden cage where only beauty and awesomeness could reside. Thus Siddhartha lived into his twenties not knowing about anything (or, at least, anything that sucked).

But he was not satisfied with this arrangement! Under cover of night, accompanied by a servant, and against his father's wishes, he ventured out into the great wide world beyond his palace walls. There, he was confronted with: a sick person, an old person, a dead person. All new for him! Siddhartha was appalled that human life was guaranteed to have such suffering - who wants to grow old and die?! - and he brooded over ways out of this existential pickle. He decided on the spiritual path and, leaving his wife and infant son behind, embarked on a spiritual journey which would end with his Enlightenment, the spread of Buddhism, and his family reunited again.

For six years, he lived as an ascetic - wasting away to skin and bones, probing the philosophies of the rishis he met, and generally trying it all out. After six years, he realized this ascetism wasn't getting him anywhere, and he accepted - to the shock and horror of his six (?) rishi companions - a bowl of curd (or was it rice?) from a village girl passing through. He then resolved to find his own way to spiritual awakening. Sitting down under the what-is-now-legendary bodhi tree, he vowed not to get up until he had achieved Enlightenment. That night, the forces of Mara - a demon representing the roller coaster of desire - attacked him, but Siddhartha was very chill and hardly cared. Eventually, Siddhartha achieved Enlightenment. He opened his eyes and saw: the full moon! This became Vesak, an important Buddhist holiday celebrated during May's full moon.

Siddhartha, who would now be called the Buddha (or, Enlightened One), thought this was great, but hesitated about sharing his newfound wisdom with the rest of humanity. Just then, Brahma (as in, THE Brahma) came down from heaven - or wherever it is Brahma hangs out nowadays (?) - and told Siddhartha/Buddha that he totally needs to tell everyone because, as he put it (I think?), there are people "with only a little dust" in their eyes. So Siddhartha/Buddha started teaching, and wandered around the Gangetic plain spreading his ideas, and then died, leaving the cycle of rebirth entirely.

So that's all great. And that's all legend and religious fiction, in our opinion. What we know of Siddhartha and Buddhism was written down 200-300 years after he died, and is now compiled in the Pali Canon. For a slightly more historical take on Siddhartha's life, you can read Pankaj Mishra's An End to Suffering (very blah) or Osamu Tezuka's 8-part manga series Buddha (very amazing!) or the Pali Canon (very encyclopedic - it covers everything). What you should definitely not do... is watch Conrad Rooks' Siddhartha.

Or, for that matter, read Herman Hesse's book, on which the film is based.

That's because Hesse (and Rooks, by default) wasn't interested in (1) a historically authentic, or (2) an according-to-legend portrayal of Siddhartha. Instead, he reinvents the story in an attempt to synthesize what struck him about Buddhism and Hinduism - both of which, by most accounts, he deeply respected. The result is a bit of a mash-up of the two (which, as Buddhists, we doth protest! but more on that some other time) in a kinda New Agey kinda Euro-centric thing. The film, which sticks pretty close to the book, is likewise vague and a little Orientalist.

In the film, Siddhartha (Shashi Kapoor) is a young, scrappy Brahmin, impatient with the spiritual sluggishness of his current lifestyle. With his friend, Govinda (Romesh Sharma), he defies his conservative father (Amrik Singh) and goes off to join the nearest group of wandering ascetics.


Govinda and Siddhartha, hanging with their new crowd.

Things take a sharp left turn when Siddhartha hears a teaching by the Buddha (!) - never shown on camera, hence enhancing his remotely divine vibe. Govinda is immediately convinced and signs up. Siddhartha, ever the skeptic, is... well, skeptical, and he tells the Buddha that, okay, that all sounds great, but he doesn't want to take some teacher's word for it - even if the teacher seems great and it's all very logical. He says he wants to figure out a spiritual path for himself. This is, actually, a very Buddhist thing to do, so well done there. The Buddha offers Siddhartha a flower and wishes him good luck.

Interlude: Siddhartha takes a ferry with a very nice boatman who talks philosophy.

Act Two. Siddhartha shows up in the nearest bustling town and is immediately smitten by the courtesan/noblewoman/Representative Vagina, Kamala (Simi Garewal). He approaches her, but she totally doesn't go for his rishi robes. So he shaves, oils his hair, and tries again - and she tells him that maybe, if he gets a job, they can date. But what employable skills does Siddhartha have? (We LOVE this line!) "I can think. I can wait. I can fast."


Ah, a woman! Will she offer some insights about the spiritual path?


Only in the bedroom!!

He is also literate, thanks to his Brahminly heritage. So a local merchant, Kamaswamy (Pincho Kapoor), hires him as an accountant and, together, they make millions! Siddhartha's life is suddenly full of inflation, payments pending, inventories and other material stuff. And, yes, both his new friends have "kama-" as the root to their names. "Kama" as in the Hindu concept of kama - the same kama making appearances in kamana ("to earn") and Kama Sutra. Insert one infamously awkward sex scene here.

Interlude: Siddhartha is now old, fat and grumpy. Being materialistic sucks! He sires a son and flees to the river.

Act Three. After convincing the philosopher-boatman to apprentice him in all things watery and deep, Siddhartha sheds his fancy silks for plain cotton, grows out his beard and meditates on the Now while ferrying people across the river, Provider of Many Metaphors. Eventually, Kamala and their son, Hassan (Kunal Kapoor, Shashi's real-life son), arrive to hear the Buddha's final teaching...


Beautiful cinematography makes up for a lot of vacuity.

From a Buddhist perspective, this film touches on several ideas which could easily fit into the standard Buddhist philosophy - the wisdom of accepting impermanence, beating your own spiritual path, the opportunity to learn from a wide variety of life experiences - but it's also vague enough that it could probably be shoe-horned into any religious framework. Consider, for example, Siddhartha's dip in the river following his materialistic period - a very Christian symbol for rebirth. Honestly, Groundhog Day is a more cutting, direct approach to Buddhism-on-film than this.

From a movie-nut perspective, the film is mediocre at best. It is only 80 minutes, but it drags those minutes into an eternal Now indeed. In its best moments - when the actors aren't speaking and the background music or symbolism is nice - you can admire the gorgeous cinematography, the luscious framing and color, the sheer aesthetics. At its worst, the movie is sluggish, meaningless and indulgent, with uniformly hideous acting. Unfortunately the film suffers from the common sin of mistaking obtuse pronouncements for wisdom, open-ended metaphors for deep insight. But with all the philosophical ambiguity, we're left with nothing in the end.


The moral of the story, in haiku form: The flowing river/How it flows so profoundly/Flow, river, flow on!

We also can't really enjoy a film with such tedious gender politics: the only woman is little more than a sex education course, far too inferior to either be angry that her husband abandoned her on a self-indulgent quest for "peace" or even hope for that peace for herself. Please! Show a woman attaining Enlightenment, Conrad Rooks/Herman Hesse, then we'll talk.


Laudamus te!

Same Time Next Year (1978)

The good ol' post-war American pop history movie is always a big gooey hit here at the PPCC. We love history, we love big picture "Oh, the humanity!" panoramas, and we are, fundamentally, made of mush. We are, also, big fans of Alan Alda (yay M*A*S*H!).

Same Time Next Year is like comfort food, all warm, homey 1970s vibes. It tells the story of George (Alan Alda) and Doris (Ellen Burstyn), two American Everypeople, who meet by chance in a California seaside resort one weekend in the 1950s. Over an innocent chat in the resort's restaurant, they hit it off big time and end up in bed. Both of them also happen to be married with kids.

However, thanks to their intense attraction and the fact that they both have viable excuses to be in California every year, they decide to repeat the one-night stand - same time, same place, the following year. And the one after that... and on, and on, for twenty-plus years.


We couldn't figure out how to take screencaps from this computer's DVD software, so here's a random picture of Ellen Burstyn, who is in this film.


As is Alan "OH GAWWD!" Alda.

This is a pretty fabulous idea, as it allows us, the audience, to meet George and Doris at five-year intervals, as they age through the tumultuous 50s, 60s and 70s. Both their love and the world they live in are painted in broad, heavy brush strokes. We laugh with George and Doris. We cry with George and Doris. Doris becomes a hippie. George gets into Freudian psychoanalysis. Doris emancipates herself and becomes a business owner.

The film's writing is snappy and irreverent, owing much to its theater pedigree (it's based on a Tony-nominated play by Bernard Slade). Alan Alda is his usual endearingly hammy, overly earnest self - he even does his signature acting move, the sobbing howl he uses to signify an emotional climax, which we will from here on dub The Alda. (As in, "OHHH GAWD! OH GAAAWD! I AM HAVING THE ALDA!"). Ellen Burstyn is a bright star - we rooted for Doris a bit more, who was complex, strong and changed the most over the course of the film. Their chemistry was also very sweet.

Unfortunately, the film's niceness takes some serious blows thanks to the cheesy photo montages (SIGNIFYING A PASSAGE OF TIME BETWEEN MEETINGS, the narrative screams) overlaid by a maudlin Celine Dion-type number (not by Celine Dion). Apparently the filmmakers passed up Paul McCartney's proposed song because it contained spoilers. That... was a mistake.

But everything else was great! Huzzah!


(Completely unrelated but Joshua Wolf Shenk's Lincoln's Melancholy is glorious.)

Barefoot Gen (1973)

Okay.

So we have a backlog of Star Trek and Hindi and Tamil and Italian films, but - dammit all - we're not going to address any of that today. Today, we want to talk to you about our new favorite media: the graphic novel. And since most graphic novels are turned into films eventually, we figure its totally within our mandate to turn the PPCC into the CBG for today. Or this month...

Our rabid desire to consume ALL GRAPHIC NOVELS EVER PRODUCED IN THE HISTORY OF THIS PLANET NAY GALAXY all started with Keiji Nakazawa's Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen) - which, incidentally, is a film (we just can't find a copy). We picked it up a few weeks ago, intrigued by the cover and description: a graphic novel about Hiroshima. Having just finished a fabulous biography about J. Robert Oppenheimer - American Prometheus, which you must all drop what you're doing and go read NOW - we were very curious to see the same topic - the atomic bomb - treated from a dramatically different perspective in a dramatically different medium. American Prometheus is the mother of a biography: nearly a thousand pages, and full of Pulitzer Prize-winning writing about all the fascinating details of being Oppenheimer. How could a graphic novel (we were still calling it a "mere cartoon" two weeks ago) compare?



Well, the best - and most startling - thing about Barefoot Gen was that it held its own against the Oppie bio (and how!), offering an insightful, provocative and deeply affecting portrayal of a working class family from Hiroshima struggling to get by in the last days before city was bombed. Told from the perspective of the family's middle child, Gen ("Roots"), the story follows the quotidian joys and sorrows of being poor and pacifist when everyone else seems to have caught war frenzy. Gen's father, a tough-yet-kind patriarch drawn in heavy, block-like lines, is stubbornly pacifist - and this brings endless grief to the family, who are humiliated and attacked again and again by the other townspeople for their beliefs. Eventually, this even drives the oldest son to join the Imperial Navy in a last-ditch effort to alleviate the family's shame. This son's experiences then form an important anti-war subplot in this already very anti-war book - with one of the most powerful moments occurring when he runs into a pair of kamikaze pilots on one last, desperate bender before they fly out the next day.

Our edition of the book has an introduction by Art Spiegelman, who has some interesting reflections on the book: the Disney-like drawing style for Gen and his little brother, the blunt storytelling, the ambiguous attitudes towards America. This is all true: Barefoot Gen offers a very straightforward portrayal of Japan during the war. Its only accusations are inward: against the bourgeoise, xenophobic attitudes of the wartime Japanese elite. And it goes to great pains to reveal the cultural pressures that drove so many soldiers and citizens to support the war and Emperor unquestioningly. From a national perspective, it's a biting, cynical criticism of "patriotism" and "valor in war". Interestingly (even eerily), from an international perspective, America isn't present at all. In light of slightly more recent evidence which shows that President Truman dropped the bomb after learning that Japan would surrender (see American Prometheus for a lot more on this), this book's attitudes towards the US seem too forgiving. But enough of politics.



The narrative structure is blunt and lacking in nuance, but the story still remains incredibly affecting. Partly this is because we know the story is semi-autobiographical, and the weight of the topic is enough. Also, while the storytelling isn't subtle, it is very skilfull - the use of the burning sun to mark the passage of time, like a countdown to the bomb we know will soon drop, steadily builds the tension. Indeed, the bombing itself occurs in the very last few pages, and the impact is enormous: by this point, we had become so immersed in Gen's life that we had almost forgotten about the bomb! Plus, we had become incredibly invested in all the characters - watching the inevitable catastrophe occur was devastating!

Another great (and very cinematic) moment occurs earlier in the book, when the oldest son, after an argument with the father, leaves town to join the Navy. Everyone - the mother, the other children, the PPCC - are freaking out, because this might be the last time the father sees his son. We have a few short panels of the son in the train, thinking about his family, and then, just as the train speeds up out of the station, he sees his father standing in the field by the train tracks, raising his arms and yelling, "Banzai!" (Live long!) It's a wonderful moment which lends itself perfectly to the screen, reminding us of some of those epic sequences from Steven Spielberg's early film about wartime Asia, Empire of the Sun.



In conclusion, this was just great. We read this on a packed airplane, stuffed between two large men, and bawled into our tray table (before storing it in an upright and locked position). We also discovered a whole new world (a new, fantastic point of view!) - the graphic novel - and learned yet more about things which fascinate us (Japan, Oppenheimer, etcetera). Definitely check this out.

(PPCC Readership in Japan: Anyone catch the 2007 live action TV drama of this?)

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

The more we watch Star Trek, the more we find that (1) they are all clearly insane, and (2) we kind of like it. It must have to do with the sweet, sticky, pumping love that the Kirk-Spock-McCoy trio give off - they are just so cute! - and the "sci-fi for the insane" ideas. A testosterone-fueled Spock goes into heat? The Greco-Roman gods were aliens? Yet another planet of human beings reenacting yet another episode from 20th-century history?!

It's all so perplexing and funny. Or, as Spockfield would say, FASCINATING.

Anyway, we've been sucked in. And after finding a moldy VHS copy of Star Trek: The Motion Picture at our local used media store, we just had to spring the two bucks and get it. After all, the last Star Trek movie we saw - Star Trek IV: The Revenge of the Humpback - was just too amazing.

Well, we couldn't have found a more orthogonal movie to follow up with - it has none of the zany self-referential charm of the whale movie, nor does it have any of the demented wackiness of the old series. The vibe is completely different: lumbering, slow, melancholy, dystopian and sinister. It felt much more like that terrifying early 80s sci-fi movie with Sean Connery (which still gives us nightmares, by the way), or, as these guys rightly point out, like a Trekkified version of 2001: A Space Odyssey (another movie we found alternatively boring and creepy). Basically: everyone's wearing hideous white suits (with booties, oh Lord), there are a number of silent scenes where people just look at each other, and it all has this semi-mystical, semi-despairing "Spaaace, SPAAAACE" vibe.


In red. (All pics copied from Google Images.)


And in blue. Yay, McCoy's back (from Woodstock?)!

The film could be divided into two acts. Act One, which lasts one hour and a half, is purified boredom. Robert Wise directed this film - and for shame, Mr. Wise! During the first 90 minutes, basically, two things happen:

1. A mysterious energy field thing is floating through space, heading for Earth (oh no!).
2. The Enterprise crew get back together.

Why did this take so long? WHY? We swear, Kirk's (William Shatner) 15-minute shuttle ride from the space station to the new Enterprise must have been filmed in real-time. Mother of God. The only sparks of goodness in this lengthy, interminable, morose sequence are:

1. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) returns! Hooray, Dr. McCoy! McCoy McCoy McCoy! He may have nothing to do, but at least he's here! And then Spock (Leonard Nimoy) too!
2. A strange, slightly comical new crew member arrives: Ilia (Persis Khambatta), she of the bald head and the funny introductions ("My oath of celibacy is on record, Captain.")
3. A horrific (and gratuitous) accident happens with the beaming technology, thus adding a sprinkle of realism to the whole beaming thing. A nice, slightly cyberpunk-ish sci-fi touch, which terrified us (and explains McCoy's reluctance to use the beamer thing) but we appreciated.

Act Two - when the Enterprise finally intercepts the mysterious floating energy cloud - becomes much, much more interesting. In fact, we shouldn't really tell you what happens, as the film goes to great pains to maintain a sense of mystery, slowly being revealed. The final scenes, when we get the answer to the puzzle, are pretty mind-blowing. It definitely blew our hair back! And all those gritty, hairy philosophical quandaries that make great sci-fi great are examined: what makes humans human, the nature of consciousness, Singularity/Arthur C. Clarke-type evolutionary jumps. All very interesting and fun.

So our advice: skip the first hour. Nothing happens. It's poorly filmed. Instead, enjoy Act Two - which is some crazy stuff, man. In terms of general filmmaking, the direction is uniformly clunky and awkward, with bad timing and confusing cuts (the scene where Spock sends the message? Oy...). The acting is also a little shaky, as if a lot of the actors were just getting used to playing these characters again. While DeForest Kelley is still charmingly awful (what is it about his ability to be objectively terrible and yet so lovable? Sigh!), the usually dependable William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy are strangely stiff and stilted. Similarly, the writing, while strong on philosophy (yay!), was a little bloodless on the whole fun Enterprise crew personality dynamic. That said, some bits were decent. The creepy, tragic love story between Commander Decker (Stephen Collins, the 1980s version of Aaron Eckhart) and alien lady Ilia (Persis Khambatta) waswell-played. The orchestral score and aesthetics were eerie and epic - very nice - especially the chunky analog look of the ships, and the post-psychedelic parabolic waves from the mystery ship. Groovy, man.

A very slow start with a cataclysmic, fun finish - not great, but not as God-awful as the beginning implied. And now... bloopers!