I think the propaganda angle is a bit of a red herring. Certainly as propaganda it'd have to be dismissed as an abject failure. Its message, as you argue, is far too elusive, mainly because Wayne's Ethan remain's one of Hollywood's great ambiguous anti-heroes - up there with Bogart's Rick, Welles' Kane, etc. Whatever else we might say about arch propagandists like Riefenstahl, Eisenstein, Griffith, etc, they went out of their way to avoid any of the very ambiguity that's made The Searchers' one of the most analysed and interpreted films ever. Not to say it doesn't have a political position, but no more than any other Western. Its Ethan's psychological and symbolic complexity - not even his racism is straight forward - and Ford's technical virtuosity, and subtlety and sheer intelligence of vision that I'd say contribute far more to its reputation than its political or ideological content.

Johnny Flash

oh i didn't mean that it was a propaganda piece, it's definitely not that, but i can't help to be informed by the ideology of the invader. i mean, ethan aside, all the gringos are good and wonderful people who deserve peace and prosperity. ethan in a way is their guard dog, and yes his flaws are individual but they somehow don't transfer to his fellow conquerors (the army yes but not the homesteaders). yes, he shows the dark side of the enterprise, but the enterprise as a whole remains clean, so to speak, and therefore justified.

this to me works out to something like saying: the warrior is a monster, but protecting our homes requires and justifies such monsters. those monsters are flawed but they serve a good cause. and i sort of agree with that, actually-- internal peace need monsters guarding the borders. but it's just that it's never fully shown how scar, the opposing monster, justifies his own monstrosity and child-kidnapping. he's shown attacking and terrorizing, but never protecting his own people. how come? it's the 50s in america.

meanwhile, we see the atrocities of the cavalry, the massacres and unnecessary killing, but the return home seems to justify everything in the end. doesn't it? it's not like natalie wood ever goes full native.

i get it that the searchers was a step forward in the history of westerns though, and it's a gorgeous movie, really a masterpiece, 10/10, but to me, from my contemporary perspective, the political change looks more like 1/4 step rather than a full one. hey, john ford was a genius, no doubt in my mind, but i can still grimace at the politics of his time event though he moved things forward a little bit.

bertolucci's "novecento". badly translated as "1900" (it's more like "the 20th century" or "the 1900s").

the full 5+ hour cut.

gorgeous.

i mean, there are a lot of problems with the cross-language dubbing--some actors speak english, others italian, others french, so no version sounds perfect because you get funny voices regardless. and the movie itself is far from perfect, but the sheer scope of it, damn, i don't know, it was like reading some epic novel, and immersing yourself into its world.




and dominique sanda-- how gorgeous was she? (her english dubbing was atrocious though)



this was all, generally, fantastic. maybe i have to be outside its influence to get some critical distance but it gave me two incredible afternoons this weekend.

Femina Ridens last night, The Lego Movie tonight.

everyone here must must must see this!!!



trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg4OCeSTL08

Watched Eyes Wide Shut again for the first time in 6 years.

Nice one, thanks

i so want to see this. both El Topo and Holy Mountain can be seen on Youtube now. in good quality.

and more Jodorowski on my duck is dead, dvd quality w/various subtitles as needed

Thanks!

Not a huge Jodorowsky fan but I've wanted this to get made ever since I heard about it.

oh no! it wasn't made. watch the trailer. this is a documentary.

it's about how it wasn't made.

and then how the work done on this movie went on to define 80s films.

insane.

The Congress

what a steaming heap, I haven't seen a movie this bad in a long time.

Could be worse, you could have had to sit through two hours of the actual Congress on C-SPAN ;)

better and more emotive acting

too much weird singing for my taste and why does the main character have to be "anorexic"? ugh...
also, it seemed like they were trying too much to seem like a wes anderson movie. but without any success, in my opinion

ha ha ha

looks like a belle and sebastian record cover

i can almost hear the lyrics in my head

---

HOLD ON A SECOND

IT IS A FUCKING BELLE AND SEBASTIAN MOVIE!!!

jeezus. had to be! my nose always knows. fuck that shit!

i think one of belle and sebastian made the movie, or he at least is responsible for the music
(why am i surprised i didnt like it?)

yeah i did a search of the title after i posted and it turned up his name. then i started cackling. because the words "god" and "girl" and those faces/haircuts and the typography had been such dead giveaways in the first place.

===


ps oh it was an album in 2009 ha ha ha. even if i had seen it already--the stench is the stench.

I saw "God Help The Girl" recently as well, and I am only aware of B&S by name. So...it was alright, nothing I'm gushing over. Research, aka wikipedia, shows me it's some long standing project that ended up having a movie as well. Definitely liked some of the songs, but not all of them.

just finished this now and i liked it

can't *really* complain about the movie since I knew what I was getting myself into, read the book back when it came out. movie was entraining and I really liked carla juri. she's a cutie!



food. -> good. it was also entertaining. and it made me want to go to new orleans

"the pervert's guide to ideology" featuring slavoj zizek



A M A Z I N G ! ! !

all the answers you wanted to get and then some. (of course it's just a beginning, but still…)

deliciously enjoyable. will blow your mind repeatedly. you will laugh and laugh and laugh. sit through the credits!!

also recently, after seeing richard stanley in the jodorowski documentary, i rewatched

HARDWARE



yes, quite derivative, borrows *a lot* from 70's-80's SF (from luke's mechanical hand to the terminator to the monster in the spaceship like alien to a look like mad max), so it's quite a pastiche, but it still keeps a freshness and energy and a certain gallows humor that set it apart. after decades of lawyerly disputes it's been on blu-ray for a few years now (and it still looks as grainy as fuck ha ha ha).

last--

EUROPA EUROPA



some people (including the old-ass trailer) will make you believe this is a bleak sad fucking movie, and it a way it is, but it is also fucking hilarious at the same time and in spite of the bleakness we couldn't stop laughing-- well of course we did eventually but much of it is funny.

i popped my agnieszka holland cherry with "in darkness" recently, and looking back at her roots she does not disappoint.

if you dig deeper you'll discover she's also directed episodes of "the wire", "the killing" and "treme" (plus some other tv shit i haven't seen). so i "knew" her after all. check her out!

Empire Records, still classic to me.

Slavoj Zizek is a cunt, a really awful person in a lot of ways, and almost always completely full of shit.

So I'm sure he comes across quite well in a film he helped make.

i don't know him personally, but this movie is really good, even if he sniffles like crazy while he's talking.

He's a good showman. Not that he fakes his eccentricities but he definitely knows how to use them to enhance his cult following. He can be laugh out loud funny but I don't take his actual ideas seriously at all. Politically, I find him completely irrelevant. Don't know about him being an awful person, though. A lot of his more controversial opinions are, I'm sure, really just there to provoke liberals - which comes across as more lazy than anything else.

i don't know if he was talking about this:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/...man_video.html

in that controversy, i totally side with zizek haaa haaa haaaa

--

ps the film was really great and highly entertaining and at times superfunny. i'm going to re-watch it.

i liked the pervert's guide to cinema

he could easily be a bad person. but he can't be that bad if he pisses off noam chomsky. also definite points for talking shit about college students.

i really wish he had film reviews like that on youtube regularly. it would be amazing.


ha ha ha. i had overheard this before but i wasn't fully aware. thanks for making me look it up.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...izek-ding-dong


internet hi-five

And thanks for the link.

While I have any number of problems with Chomsky, if the question is between the practical and the theoretical, I'll take the practical.

Chomsky alerts me to, say, how the CIA covertly fights a "war on drugs" in Central America. Žižek writes some crap about the Hegalian subtext in Blade Runner or whatever the fuck. Might be "fun" for some, but in the end he's just playing a shallow game.

And I wonder what his thoughts are on all the college girls he's fucked?

he thinks they have juicy pussies.....

repeated genocide denial is not "practical". actually it is very "theoretical" because he presents conspiracy "theories" created by war criminals as 'facts'
personally i'd rather he talk about movies because i'm never going to accept the lefty equivalent of ernst zundel as a good source of info on world events.

jonathan glazer's

UNDER THE SKIN



fantastic movie! excellent in every way. superb camera work and editing and great performance by scarlett. great soundtrack. my only complaint would be the nearly impossible to understand scottish accents, but eh-- it's a film of few words anyway-- moods are more important here. this movie is stylish as fuck.

extra bonus if you like scarlett, because you get to stare & stare at her until you have memorized every aspect of her face and many of her body as well-- quite the scopophiliac's delight.

i understand this is a distant adaptation of a dutch novel, but having read now a synopsis of the book this seems to me a much better story purged of the blatant didacticism of the source material.

my only problem here is with an underlying gender narrative that i won't discuss in this post but maybe another time if people are willing to handle total and absolute spoilers.

Always a bit of a difficult one to watch due to the historical fact to it



I had to follow it up with





to regain some sanity.

The Departed was on last night and I couldn't stop watching it. Its not necessarily the best film by any of the actors in it, and yet, I really dig this flick. I also watched the last hour of The Shawshank Redemption and damn it, I was crying (happy tears) at the end like I ALWAYS DO for that damned movie, even in the fucking 8th grade watching it at school!!

Bastards

@tw2113- i had to look upthe magdalene sisters-- wow! DAMN! i guess i understand now the story behind "philomena" but i didn't know it was such widespread sadism. thanks for the mention i'll check it out some day (some day when i want to get depressed!-- but seriously…)

===

most recently watched--

don jon- starts like a comedy, and it gets progressively serious. i liked the funny parts better because they were more skilfully done; near the end the drama gets a little obvious, but then it's a nice little fable "for the kids", very watchable overall, not the greatest but not a waste of time either. check it out.

beyond outrage - i didn't realize this was the sequel to "outrage" so i didn't get everything until the end but beat takeshi is always awesome so now i'll have to go in reverse. watch "outrage" first!

the element of crime - lars von trier's first feature, all the way from back in the 80s! pretty great for its time, you'll see a lot of his obsessions on display here (hypnosis, water, possession, decay, experimental elements within conventional narratives, etc.). i didn't know his work went so far back, this predates "europa" by 5 or 6 years.

throne of blood - macbeth by kurosawa! what more can i say? amazing.

samurai assassin - this was a pretty fucking crummy dvd transfer with horrible subtitles and i couldn't watch it for very long. maybe i missed out, maybe i missed out on some heavy sleep.

joe - two good things here: 1) david gordon green going back to his southern roots (e.g. "george washington"), and 2) nicolas cage in a non-cartoony, non-blockbuster role. yes, he's still himself, but this time his acting fits the part and it's a pretty great movie especially if you like gritty redneck melodramas like "winter's bone" only lots funnier. check it. can get a little brutal but great movie overall.