Stray Dog

Stray Dog (1949)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041699/]

The Gist:
This is an early film by Akira Kurosawa, essentially a detective piece that often slips into a smooth workable formula. However, there are constant moments in this film where you realize you are watching a Kurosawa film. The film starts out with an anonymous voice over that sets up the action (the theft of a policeman's gun) and as the film goes on it turns into a desperate pursuit of the criminal who has ended up with the gun and has put it to terrible use. There are some complex themes at work here, namely the guilt of the younger police officer who tries to take responsibility for the bad his gun has wrought. However, what really makes the film shine are these spontaneous moments of beauty, like how the older policeman takes the rookie to his house and gets toasted on sake, shows him his family sleeping, laments about the nature of being cop. There is something about these quiet moments that makes Stray Dog feel more powerful than some of his other masterworks, because here they felt beautifully unpredictable, not so deliberate.

Week Thirty-Eight

Alright, I'm going to have to cheat a little (see week thirty-nine) but I'm getting through the month on time. New queue, already finished:

The Girlfriend Experience (2009) - check
Evil Dead 2 (1987) - check
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) - check
Stray Dog (1949) - check

On Another Note:
Changed my mind, not cheating like I was going to. The integrity of the project remains largely intact.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043456/]

The Gist:
The moment World War II concluded with the advent of the nuclear bomb, a subtle shift in our culture took place that we are now seeing coming to full force in our modern era. Namely, it's the idea that the path humanity has taken is intensely capable of future self-destruction, that our actions as a whole could lead to our unraveling, where our improbable stint of life in this vast cosmic desert will be snuffed out as soon as it began like a brilliant star that cannot contain the energy it emits. The Day the Earth Stood Still is an excellent allegory for all this, and leaves the viewer with only doubt as to our capacity to recover from our headstrong and ignorant and selfish and passive and defeatist and head-in-the-sand tendencies. Now, in a time where overpopulation threatens our natural resources and fisheries are being depleted from over fishing and climate change and oil is spilling into the Gulf of Mexico unceasingly and countries like Iran are trying to obtain nuclear power and a country like North Korea already has nuclear power and our political system still seems so corrupt and divisive that even with the good intentions of a president that I still have faith in its dubious whether anything significant can in fact happen to show a change as drastic as is needed and whales are dying and whooping cranes are dying and the Japanese are slaughtering dolphins and people are getting mercury poisoning from the fish from the pollution and the entire food industry is filled with cows eating cows and eating corn and then there's genetically altered chickens and then there's corn syrup in everything and...well, in these modern times, I find some odd personal connection to this film and regard it as something of a prophetic vision of our own collapse.

From Russia with Love

From Russia with Love (1963)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057076/]

The Gist:
From Russia with Love has all the markings of a sequel. They attempt a delicate game of repetition and variation, trying to capitalize on the success of Dr. No by creating a ritualized opening that the entire Bond series would eventually become known for. In particular, you have a mysterious opening scene that somehow will propel Bond in to action (Dr. No = conspicuous murder...From Russia = conspicuous murder of man wearing very convincing James Bond mask a la Scooby Doo), you have Bond being called away from schticking some British trollop, you have the meeting with M where the mission is laid out along with gratuitous flirtations with Money Penny, and so on. In short, the Bond films are exemplary at creating a familiar experience while offering enough change on the formula to draw viewers in. The only problem with this film is that the process hadn't been perfected yet, and the plot of the film suffers a great lull due to the whole mission seeming vaguely unimportant and meandering. The ending has a great action sequence in a train, but it couldn't make up for the movie as a whole.

Barton Fink

Barton Fink (1991)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101410/]

The Gist:
Oddly enough, when I watched Barton Fink devolve into chaos, an unlikely spiritual film descendant came to mind: Mulholland Dr. Both films skewer the surrounding area of Los Angeles, the insincere mock up of personalities and the ugly carnal beast that resides beneath the initial impressions of beauty and grace. Both films also take that atmosphere and try to make some kind of connection to the larger mystery of life (mind you, these are just my reads on highly interpretive works of art). With Mulholland Drive that mystery was of death and silence and the tenuous grasps we make at relationships to try and fill some void or overwhelm our senses so we don't feel the constant decay of time. With Barton Fink, that mystery is of our purpose in life, our inner nature, the capacity for good and evil with us. I left both films having strong emotional impressions that were confounded by some clumsy effort to understand "what it all means", and with Barton Fink I sat talking with my friend about possible interpretations for a couple hours after the film.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1032846/]

The Gist:
I've never been someone who gets overly disturbed in films. With the rare exception, horror films and suspense films don't really engage me on a level where I fear for the characters lives, where I feel myself knotted up with anxiety. Those few films that manage to instill such emotion in me generally stay with me for a while, and I can honestly say that 4 Months is one of those films. The film is set in Romania, where a woman helps her friend get an illegal abortion in a 1980s setting that apparently was so conservative that the act could land them both in jail. The ordeals they have to go through and the general trama that the abortion inflicts by itself lends such gravity to the film that I felt a bit sick after watching it (more so than Irreversible, if you can believe that). Anyway, the acting, the careful minimalism, the beautiful ending scene where they sit in silence as you see cars pass through the reflection of the window...yeah.

Week Thirty-Seven

Alright, I'm pretty behind in the month. No excuse except that I've been working a lot. New queue for the week:

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007) - check
From Russia with Love (1963) - check
Barton Fink (1991) - check
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) - check