Metaphor is words used to stand for something else, and I just am very specific and literal minded when it comes to words/language. (why I hate magical realism, blech). symbols are visual. They are open-ended, and change depending on the viewer.

I love The Old Man & The Sea for the gripping tale it is, for the spare language, for the insight intgo the motivations of an old fisherman fighting one last great fight, but I could give a flying fuck about the metaphors that every literary review tries to imply are evident in the tale...



The movie was very good looking, and skillfully directed, but I found the "story" to be light, basic, and unnecessarily padded/long.

right, old man and the sea is very straightforward and has mainly one character-- with the boy being a sort of accessory to the plot. and a single "idea" behind it, the struggle-to-the-death. kill in order to live sort of thing. very straightforward.

mud has lots of characters and layers and it's really two main themes. one is the epic scale of changing river life making its mark upon individuals (hence, not navel gazer, cuz epic is the opposite). the other is the inadequate teenage notion of romantic love (in this case, potential navel-gazing, but the boy wakes up).

if you like literature then mark twain is one of the purported sources here. tom/huck/the river/the fugitive/etc

btw if you liked old man and the sea it looks to me that you might really like "all is lost". i haven't seen it yet but was recommended to me by a friend and it looks right up your alley. one of the main features as i recall described to me is no words spoken in it. so maybe check it out.

peckinpah's "the wild bunch". original director's cut. on blu-ray.

right now i think there is no better movie ever made. from the opening credits to the very last sequence.

maybe tomorrow that impression will fade, but not today.

the full cut is simply FANTASTIC. makes for an even better film-- really complete this way. great dialogue. everything. EVERYTHING.

Yeah. Brilliant film. The last Western, and all that. I often wonder who made the better Westerns: Ford or Peckinpah. Ford probably made the better films but purely in terms of Westerns I increasingly think it has to be Peckinpah.

Meanwhile, finally watched Woman in Black last night. Excellent movie, and unusually scary for a Hammer film. I've always loved Hammer but they never actually scared me. This one really got to me. Let's hope Hammer v2.0 can keep this up.

ideologically i like ford very little. visually/technically he made incredible stuff. but he's more of a different century-- he's naive, he seems to believe in rah rah america and manifest destiny. he's great but i see his movies as a dated cultural artifact. even searchers where he supposedly criticizes western stereotypes... i kind of don't think so. i read it as "these are the ugly men we have in the frontier SO THAT we can have our nice homes." bit like jack nicholson's dialogue in "a few good men."

wild bunch is more of a.... am i going to say this?... an existentialist movie. he deals in death and absurdity-- not just absurd situations but in the absurdity of human cruelty... those children, damn. (and i've seen the same children outside of a movie).

this comes through much more clearly in the director's cut than in the versions i saw before. the ones before look like a bit of squib porn-- i mean, magnificent vilence, but mostly violence. this one is... wow... philosophical. i have no other word for that. i don't know if i just saw it in the right moment or it's after seeing it so many times but yesterday it was like every line of dialogue, every shot, every character, every plot point opened up completely.

when i see a ford movie i'm amazed in part but i also say "oh, corny old times." THIS cut of wild bunch is... doesn't need translation/interpretation/transposition/hermeneutics. it's just. wow.

the other cuts of this movie should be burned out of existence so that nobody is ever misled again into thinking that it was a glorification of violence. it isn't. this is not "pulp fiction." damn damn damn. this movie is something else. after a few days maybe my mind will settle and i'll see it more clinically, but today... wow.

...

i think i haven't seen woman in black... will have to look that up

I don't disagree, I just have less of a problem with it, perhaps because I'm not an American so don't have to deal with the reality of Ford's ideological crap on a day-to-day basis.


I wouldn't say it's any more existential than The Searchers and in many ways, in spite of Ford's and Peckinpah's political differences, even their ultimate message is similar - albeit coming from quite different perspectives.


It's very good. On the surface it feels like the older Hammer stuff but definitely not a pastiche. And far darker than anything from the Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing era.

what's that? and is it any good?


this i don't see. could you please elaborate a bit? i mean about the ultimate message.

Just the idea that the cowboy/outlaw had become outdated. But where Ford, as you say, saw them as having a fundamental role in founding a civilisation, Peckinpah seems to have seen them as only standing in its way, and only made obsolete by another kind of violence. Or something like that.

yeah. yes.

that i see as more of a premise than a conclusion though.

i think for me the key in wild bunch is when dutch gets mad at thornton for giving his world to a railroad. and repeats furiously that what's important it's not your word-- "it's who you give it to! it's who you give it to!"

i got that with my spine

and it's about the freedom to choose your loyalties. which in the case of the gorches has to be forced upon them but in the end they get it.

see where i see both directors at different ends is how the trope of the outdated cowboy in ford serves as a call to serve whatever institution for the greater glory of some sort of legal fiction with claims of immortality beyond the individual. whereas in wild bunch where pike declares "we don't share a lot of views with our government" it serves more as a call to the individual to choose their own path in an absurd and chaotic hell in which everything is doomed to die brutally and get eaten by buzzards and/or machines and machine people. and in the end thornton watches the buzzards and he even smiles and sort of accepts this is where he is.

funny thing imdb says wild bunch is "bitter," but whoever wrote that does not get how in the closing sequence everyone is recalled by their laughter. and it's not a bitter laugh but a life-affirming human thing of being able to laugh in the face of the abyss which we but not the animals can see. and i find that to be an absolutely lovely thing and much more essential than any cause that has a flag. what people have been missing about wild bunch is the part that rises above the violence and brutality and is really beautiful.

Ford definitely sees the cowboy as serving a greater good (civilisation: law; government; church; family; towns) then disappearing once that greater good is in place. It runs through all his westerns. So while there's lots of blurring of boundaries, it seems that Peckinpah represents a modern vision (emphasising social alienation) while Ford represents a classical one (emphasising social harmony). For me, Ford's treatment of his subject is more profound than Peckinpah's, even though I'm probably more aligned with Peckinpah's politics. Although not entirely.

right, peckinpah is very modern, very current, which is why no translation necessary. with ford is like "oh, nice-- did people really use to believe those things?"

i don't know what you meant by profound. but wild bunch gets right up there in the face of death. not just the death of the individual but the death of god. it tries to answer the question: how to face the abyss in the absence of god. hence the existential label. to me that's as good as art gets.

wild bunch is a kind of bhagavad gita for atheists. that's where it blows everything else out of the water for me.

To say that I find Ford more profound isn't to say that I find Peckinpah lacking in that area. Both filmmakers dealt with epic subjects in epic ways. Although your saying that Ford is like "oh, nice-- did people really used to believe those things?", you could argue that your political establishment still fights elections on the very same ideology that Ford reflected in his westerns. The drive to democratise the middle east and depose dictators is perfectly in line with the logic of a film like Liberty Valence. What Peckinpah tapped into is a more countercultural set of ideas which Ford obviously didn't, but outside of its liberal hotbeds, and from the outside looking in, I'd say massive sections of the US are still pretty Fordian. As you say, the Wild Bunch is 'a kind of bhagavad gita for modern atheists'. Maybe, but there are a helluva lot of Americans who aren't. I suspect you've got a lot more who, as Ford did, see the church as a progressive, unifying institution.

yeah a megaton of americans live by such fordian values for sure. i'd say still the majority outside of big cities. they'd love john wayne as president (but they only got reagan).

i edited out "modern" from atheists because the honor and loyalty of pike's bunch is very much an anachronism in our narcissistic times-- hell, it's even portrayed as an anachronism of its times. but the atheist part remains, which is why it's still, well, modern, and valid ha ha ha.

but im still asking (in earnest, not to shoot it down) what you meant by profound. i don't know what you mean in this context. going by googable dictionary it's either intense or insightful. you mean ford had a greater insight into the questions his films asked? or into his characters? or do you mean it has more intense emotions?

yeah i liked...a nice french comedy to put you in a good mood...here the synopsis :

Michel, passionate about jazz, has just discovered a rare album that he dreams to listen quietly in his living room. But the world seems to have conspired against him, his wife just chose that moment to make her untimely revelation, his son shows up unexpectedly, one of his friends is knocking on the door, while his mother keeps calling him on his mobile. Not to mention the fact that it's today the famous Neighbours' Day. Manipulator, liar, Michel is desperate to have peace. Is it still possible today to have an hour of peace?

ah ha ha ha. i wanna see that. thanks!

Well I'd say it offers profound insight into the character of a man faced with having to decide between doing what he feels is right, for him, and what he believes is right, for society. It's unusual for a Western in that its notion of heroism is tied to one of personal compromise, although it's a theme that to a greater or lesser degree runs through all of Ford's Westerns. Peckinpah seems more clear-cut and dare I say conventional in comparison.

aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh...

that makes a lot of sense

thanks!

and yes, in the sense that ford's characters are better constructed-- he's more "theatrical", but in a good sense, that theatre is about characters and so are his movies.

in peckinpah-- well at least in the wild bunch-- the characters are more like-- cipers at the service of a great idea. "here's this horrible world, here are the people in it" they're more like, devices to advance a world view. the drama is outside, not so much at a personal level. it's more like, force a collides with force b is detoured on force c, etc. impersonal in a way.

yes.

whereas ford's characters are more, well, "human."

it's a bit of the old kubrick discussion we've been having, isn't it? i mean, similar...

i'll have to mull it over a bit longer... but i think i see what you're saying and you're right about that. ford's characters have more depth in themselves. it's more drama. whereas peckinpah is more old epic-- a bit like the illiad.

Exactly, Peckinpah's characters seem more like chess pieces, which I don't necessarily see as a fault, especially when you bring Kubrick into the debate.
Peckinpah, while in many ways similar to Kubrick, didn't make the mistake that I think Kubrick often did, of choosing films that actually demanded a more human, psychologically complex approach (Eyes Wide Shut, The Shining). Peckinpah chose or adapted projects that worked to his strengths. He evidently wasn't that interested in psychology, whereas Kubrick evidently was. He just wasn't very good at handling it.

Although I'll always say that Slim Pickens' death in Pat Garrett is one of the most quietly moving, human moments in any Western.

And yet Ford could hint at an entire subplot with just a look and a sip of coffee. Just watch Ward Bond's face when Wayne takes the coat. That's what I mean by profound! It probably better defines Ford's genius than any gunfight. We can (rightly) praise Bond as a great actor but it takes a special director to see it, stay on it, and let a simple look tell its own story. And without the overkill of a close up.

yes. ford does that. he's more about human relationships. searchers is really all about that.

peckinpah is more about death. what to do in the face of it. that's where he gets me-- it's one of my major preoccupations in life. is peckinpah a more skilled director of actors than ford? of course not. but his view of the world is just exactly where it matters to me.

i was jsut reading about him adn i saw that he got involved in zen while he was with the marines in china. and i can totally see that in the wild bunch-- not just the way the wild bunch operates like a military platoon. but the buddhist idea that the world is made of suffering, which can't be avoidd, and we're hurling inexorably towards old age, illness, and death. and i can relate to that in a very essential way. that speaks to me completely.

i was thinking of that watching thornton when he contemplates the bounty hunters pillage the corpses and take away his friends. he's okay with the world-- he sees things as they are and he smiles. it's all okay. he accepts it all. he doesn't get outraged by the desecration of a corpse-- it's just a corpse, and he lets them go. he doesn't get worked up over representations or symbolism. he has quit working for the railroad and he lets the "egg-sucking gutter trash" leave undisturbed-- he's not an angry old testament god about to punish the wicked for their wickedness.

also when dutch makes fun of wanting to have a funeral for their dead comrades, at the beginning-- "i want church service, and then i want a nice dinner with the choir..." his noblest characters see things as they are, without getting lost in representations, and operate from necessity.

ford is a christian-- not sure if a paracticing one, but his outlook clearly reflects that. that's where i can say, wow, what amazing craft, butin the end it doesn't punch me in the gut.

i know it's reductionist to peg peckinpah's work as "buddhist". i wouldn't say that defines his art. but i can totally see his "metaphysics"--a lot more than just politics-- much along those lines.

the more i think about it, the more i believe peckinpah wasn't about "ultraviolence"-- it was more about having his eyes wide open to life's basic realities and not wanting to look away from them. MOST works of art will flee to ideas, to mythologies, to ideals, but this fucker did not flinch one bit. not one bit. he kept staring.

--

ps please don't let my terrible typing distract. been writing upside down with my thumbs all day so i've been involutnarily spelling like a moron.

just finished watching (2nd time in my life) fassbinder's merchant of four seasons (sorry i don't know the german title).

it's great to be able to watch movies again. and the movie is great. sad and funny--very funny.

listening now to some criterion commentary linking him to dougas sirk. now i have to watch sirk for sure! i think i might have seen one or two, unaware of him.

I never knew about the buddhist thing but it's interesting, especially in his treatment of violence. I could kind of make the connection if he simply showed it how it is, as a kind of natural force, but doesn't his excessive use of slo-mo, etc, only ultimately serve to make it something other than what it is? For me it does become idealised, mythologised. Surely it's impossible to read the final scenes of a film like Straw Dogs any other way. Even Slim Pickens' death in Pat Garrett, which I love, is ultimately a glorification of death through violence.

Ford's western's are noted by their general lack of violence compared with pretty much any western. Even big gunfights are either shown off camera or in such a way that they appear uneventful. Even his portrayal of the gunfight at the OK corral in Clementine is a bit of a non-event, relative to its treatment in other films. Not sure if that's attributed to his Irish catholicism but it's something I've always liked about his films: as though he saw violence as a socially necessary but ultimately banal act.

I like Merchant of Four Seasons a lot but I'm struggling to find anything very funny in it, although it's a while since I watched it.

And yeah, definitely check Sirk out, although I'm slightly at a loss as to why Fassbinder is so often described as being a very Sirkian filmmaker. All his interviews have him talking about what a huge influence he was but I just don't see it translated into the films themselves. A bit like when Tarantino goes on about his debt to Mario Bava. Cool but where is it in the actual films?

Thank you two! The Wild Bunch is next in line for me. It seems right up my alley.

make sure it's the original director's cut. ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES. seriously.

@ demonyo: posting in a break from work but i'll reply later to the glorification of violence + sirk bits.

the funny (to me) & sirk actually relate.

according to the critic (some professor of german) (sorry i have already sent back the disc and i can't rewatch it) fassbinder in the 60s made very cold very intellectual films in which there wasn't a lot of love for the characters.

around 1970 he discovers sirk and adopts similar techniques to portray an excess of emotion (previously absent in him): very artificial lighting, very calculated mise en scene, exaggerated acting, etc.



the difference (i think) is that while sirk apparently made these things in earnest (i don't know, having not seen) fassbinder seems to use them for ironic & critical effect. the take for me seems to be that having feelings makes you vulnerable to exploitation, and a display of feelings is never innocent but rather part of a larger machinery of social repression.

i watched this interview after teh movie so i didn't go back to corroborate but can say some things i remember noticing: these zoom-ins into closeup. the massive tears in the wife's face that look like she was splattered with egg white (see photo), the whole story with that little record he plays over. his "true love" dressed like some butterfly. the lashing in the war flashback-- looks more like a bedroom scene. the drinking and throwing of chairs and everything-- it's all over the top, but it doesn't sweep you. then at the very final scene, that very deadpan "okay" comes in total contrast from eeeeeeeeverything that has happened before. and of course we laughed at this. it's the realpolitik beneath the great display of feeling.

and the reason why i think all this is funny is that, while the pain of the characters is supposed to be authentic, the display of emotion is highly artificial and self-conscious, and seems to point at something else, to look at social structures and ideologies beneath feelings, as way as ways in wich people manipulate and mindfuck each other. it's the opposite of a "romantic" film in which the focus is on the feelings and everything else is an excuse. here the feelings are deprived of their finality through exaggeration-- we see past them, into other machinery in operation.

in some other type of drama, a class difference between lovers is an obstacle to be overcome by love; here love can't overcome it and instead we end up looking at class prejudices very coldly. i'm not saying sirk may not do this either, as i've said i have not seen him, but OTHER films don't do that-- the princess marries the pauper, love triumphs, etc.

so i don't know how or to what end sirk used his exaggerated feeling, but in the case of fassbinder it appears to me to be very very brechtian. distancing rather than demanding instant identification. so a lot of the feeling comes across as massive contrivance-- to use or manipulate someone for example. and the sister-as-greek-chorus helps us see that.

in the case of the film-- it shows completely how love is given or withdrawn according to performance of class standards. performance = love. that is completely cold and completely horrible, and that's the supersad part.

and yes, while i feel for the characters, i've always found brechtian irony very funny. no?? on top of the supersad, you can also laugh. a bit like his friend in the war-- "let's go save him" "no, wait, let's see what happens." i guess his friend is a stand in for the audience, too. "you're a pig". ha ha ha ha. yes. oh and absurdities like the encounter with the friend in the bar/restaurant-- they look at each other, he drops the plates he's about to serve, they embrace, walk hand in hand, we're left looking at the broken plates on the floor. hilarious.

plus, this totally ex-post-facto, and completely arbitrary, which only adds to a brechtian read-- the main character looks to me a lot like george costanza, ha ha ha. similar face, body type, even some attitudes.

jesus that sounds horrible. Like torture...

yes... merchant of four seasons is very much a film about torture. social torture more than the conventional kind. but there's that kind too!

Sirk was definitely using it ironically. He wanted to show how fake and constructed hollywood was. He often put in outrageously ott happy endings for that very reason. And as you say with Fassbinder, very Brechtian. In terms of humour, I can see now why you might find him funny but he's never had that affect on me. I ultimately find his films quite cruel, which isn't a criticism of him/his films, more just a reflection of my narrow reading of him/them.

aaaaah-- then i DEFINITELY have to watch sirk. i'll have to put together a list & add it to my rental queue.

and yeah, it's not a happy laugh but it's definitely a laugh for me. in this one, not in all of them. with another one i watched recently, what's the name-- the one with the klimt woman-- petra von kant-- i only recall laughing at what the servant does when petra finally treats her nicely. i probably laughed at more but i don't recall it as a funny movie.

as for cruelty, yes, there's a lot of sadomasochism in his work. hans in merchant of four seasons is a classic masochist. his mother is a cold narcissistic sadist. his wife is a little more strange, i'll have to work that out. but yes-- he's all about power relationships, isn't he?

in a way, i was going to say earlier, he reminds me of peckinpah. because he's another one who doesn't flinch from horror-- real horror, not horror porn. he stares at what's fucked up and keeps staring. like when hans beats up his wife-- it's ugly and very uncomfortable but hans keeps beating and beating and beating and fassbinder makes us watch. "let's not pretend this shit doesn't happen."

is that cruel? sure, but-- life is cruel when you're fucked up-- and these people are fucked up and cruel to each other. is that how post-war germany was? is that how the economic miracle operated? i wasn't there but he seems to be saying so.

by the way, one thing the professor notes is that the names of the people--including the lawyer the wife calls, etc-- are names of prominent nazis. knowing that, that's funny-- it's almost out of mel brooks or zucker brothers (or marx bros?).

so, i don't see him as endorsing that cruelty, but rather pointing the finger at it. this is, in a way, reflected in the sister who defends hans and points at everyone's hipocrisy. and we watch, like his friend watched, and he calls us pigs. so we're cruel too.

the thing though, you have much bleaker, darker and brutal and violent films like "shallow grave" which are classified as "black comedies". and i don't find that one (or others of similar stripe, like a recent scottish one about a cop who is dying and hallucinating) funny at all-- they're just awful people being awful and nothing else. but in merchant, see-- i see the irony, i understand the social criticism, i understand the function, the hypocrisy is laid bare-- and that's sort of where the laugh comes from. not from the cruelty itself, but from the realization that it brings. the characters may act inhumane but the movie itself doesn't, i think. at least this one-- it's very lucid about little bourgeois customs.

Legend..

And its a masterpiece..

He seemed obsessed with control, power and, while I do think he was making broader social points with that, it also seemed to reflect aspects of his personal life and his relations with his inner circle. His films are a bit like Warhol's screen tests in that respect, but whereas Warhol set up a one-on-one power relationship between the camera and the sitter, Fassbinder played it out through a narrative (closer in that sense to some of Warhol's Paul Morrissey films). You could say Hanna Schygulla, Margit Carstenson, etc., were his equivalent 'superstars'. Had Fassbinder himself not made such a thing of his interest in Sirk, I think critics might've more readily connected him with Warhol. Conceptually anyway, a film like Petra Von Kant could've easily come out of the Factory.

i've never been able to stay awake through any warhol or morrissey films. and margit casterson in petra von kant, okay, she's got the iconic presence etc, but that movie is about much more than her being an icon-- it's about an icon getting old! and yes, there's an intimate/family/inner circle aspect to fassbinder's films like there is to many artists (i remember chinese roulette blowing my mind ages ago), but there's also very much a social aspect too. a lot of directors work with the same casts over and over (since you said warhol i'll say waters). but warhol would never had made something like mother küster's trip to heaven or the marriage of maria braun

anyway, this is superfun, and i'm almost forgetting to reply to the peckinpah thing. i will soon.

btw, i did put a sirk movie in my queue. since i'm obsessed with chronological developments i'm starting with "la habanera" in a kino edition. i'll get to the 40s and 50s in due time...

Fair enough about not seeing them but I didn't mean in terms of their iconicity but the power plays they both seemed to focus on. And by Superstars I just meant a regular group of performers who appeared in Fassbinder's films but were also part of his social circle.


Haven't seen La Habanera but the films most people refer to as classically 'Sirkian' are Written on the Wind, All that Heaven Allows and the remake of Imitation of Life.

EDIT: You might've seen Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven, with Julianne Moore, which is a kind of pastiche/tribute to those films.

Speaking of Peckinpah, are you a fan of Walter Hill? Always thought he was something of an heir to Peckinpah. Not in all his films but definitely stuff like Southern Comfort, Last Man Standing, Extreme Prejudice. Wonderful stuff. He also had a big hand in the Deadwood series but that was a bit hit and miss.

right... his 50s films are the apex... i'll get there, as i'm trying to be methodical in my approach. la habanera was actually shot in germany! with some famous swedish actress... right before he fled.

and yeah, saw the todd haynes one, and knew about the film connection (without knowing about sirk himself). it was a pretty good period piece i thought and good subject matter, but what i recall about it most is the look-- very vivid and colorful and high key light. ha, like almodóvar. this sirk appears more & more important every day and i'm sorry to have missed him so completely for so long. i've started to read about him a bit now...

anyway don't know about walter hill. loved the first year of deadwood, then it turned to watery shits. but i'll post you (later) my take on the violence thing. soon as i can focus. or need an excuse to procrastinate working on taxes, ha ha ha.

This probably won't mean much to people who lived outside the UK in the 80s but the Luke Goss (ex-Bros) is now an actor and makes absolutely heinous low budget action films. I've had to watch a few at work and they are the kind of films that make you think that the conservatives will win, the earth will fall into the sea, and those of us that survive will spend our remaining days giving blowjobs to the Koch brothers.

Haha. I've seen him in a couple of things. Directors seem to have him filed under 'If Jason Statham's unavailable ...'

More like "If Jason Statham won't give us the time of day..."

City of the Living Dead (Lucio Fulci)

Seen this plenty of times before on nth generation video but finally saw it in a decent version (Arrow Video). One of Fulci's more overlooked films but definitely up there with his best. Although not based on an actual Lovecraft story there's some references to his mythos and has a general Lovecraftian feel. If you like Lovecraft, ultra-low budgets, poor dubbing, outrageous gore and synth-heavy soundtracks you're gonna absolutely love it. Although if you do like those things then you've probably already seen it and love it.





--

Friday the 13th (Remake)

I'm not the biggest fan of the original but do enjoy it. I hated this though. It encapsulates the problem with so many current slasher remakes, in that within a few minutes of introducing the kids/potential victims I hate them so much that I just want them to die immediately. There's a million other things wrong with it but I can't even be bothered to go into them.


I'm on Jason's side.

The Conjuring



Bits of this were almost unenjoyably terrifying. I was actually quite relieved when some of its sillier moments came, just for providing a bit of relief from the really really scary bits.