Drácula (1931) directed by Enrique Tovar Ávalos & George Melford

 I suppose I can come through with a Halloween movie review this year. This is the interesting Spanish-language version of Universal Studios' Dracula adaptation. The original English-language launched the career of horror actor Bela Lugosi, but many people note that the direction, set, and costume design of this version is superior. This is widely regarded as the "hotter & sexier" version that is more closer in that sense to the original. The gothic atmosphere played-up more and some of the acting is done better, but not much. Carlos Villarías does his best to try and match Lugosi, but that is what the English-language version has on this one, otherwise this would be 100% better rather than 80% better.

My Review of Chez Jolie Coiffure (2018) directed by Rosine Mbakam

 What a beautiful little documentary this was. Chez Jolie Coiffure is a cinéma vérité documentary about an undocumented Cameroonian hairdresser named Sabine and her salon that she runs in an underground mall in Belgium. The film is done totally in the salon and it documents the daily life of Sabine, her employees, and her customers and it commentates on the wider community of African immigrants in Belgium. For me, it is an interesting look at how immigrant communities outside the United States deal with the issue of immigration, trying to get citizenship in a system that tries to make it impossible, and how folks deal with their everyday lives in the meantime. This is the first film I have watched by the film-maker Rosine Mftego Mbakam, but it won't be my last.

My (short) Review/Impression on Squid Game (2021) directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk

 I suppose this will be a partial-continuation of my previous review in relation to the survival-horror genre. Squid Game has become the premier Netflix title and while it ain't bad, I don't think it is the greatest thing: basically it's a'ight. I suppose to me this serial does not really do anything new, but does a lot old. For me, it is the fact that it relies so much on stock-genre tropes and lazy stereotypes. The actual action parts are entertaining and interesting, but once the show gets into its rhythm it becomes too predictable and by-the-numbers for me. Even the "twist" was seen a mile-a-way. It's still better than As the Gods Will, but this would work well for someone who is not use to these kinds of shows. Teenage me would have liked this more than 30-something me. 

I guess the moral is that Battle Royale was the first and possibly still the best of this genre. I did get the commentary on the wealth disparity in South Korean society. I felt like this was ok, but had more potential than was delivered. 

My Review of A Man Escaped (1956) directed by Robert Bresson

Robert Bresson's films are about people trying to find their way into some sort-of grace or salvation. About dealing with the mystical or god-like in everyday situations and often through dirty or unpleasant means. In this film we find a member of the French Resistance (based on André Devigny) being housed in Montluc Prison while awaiting to be executed during WWII. The fighter (called Fontaine in the movie) is not content to wait for his death and immediately plans to escape, but the Nazis are not about to make it that easy. He now has to make it out of this heavily-fortified prison alive with every move under close watch.

This film is an A to Z of what one gets in a Bresson film. Anonymous actors (who Bresson always referred to as his models) do not act so much as recite the lines with as little emotion as possible. There is a "holy minimalism" in how the action is portrayed in these films (and yes, despite how restrained the actors "models" are, they're the ones that drive the plot). The sparse use of music is another thing that distinguishes this and other movies of Bresson, because of how precise he uses it is use. We get some music during the movie's intro and then none for about 30 minutes until a random scene where the prisoners are emptying their slop jars in the prison yards. He said that he wanted this to represent a precise moment of ritual for the characters lives. This all goes back to Bresson's quest to purge cinema or movies (which Bresson unhelpfully calls "cinematography") of as much of the influence of the theater or plays as possible. That's why he calls his movie actors "models": in his mind actors belong in places like Broadway, film has to have its own language distinct from what came before it. Other directors like Andrei Tarkovsky and Mohsen Makhmalbaf thought on similar lines, but neither took it as far as Bresson to try and remake the basic language and function and cinema as we know it. Even his devoted fanbase of film-makers in the French New Wave were not prepared to "transgress" (though Bresson would probably see it as a purification) in the way that he was.

This film, and all of Bresson's films, is an experience unto itself and you either going to like it or hate it. This is a film about prisoners escaping the Nazis, there were countless films with that plot before A Man Escaped, and have been countless since, but I guarantee none of them look like this.

My Review of Late Spring (1949) directed by Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu's career can be divided up quite neatly: there's everything before Late Spring and everything he made after it. Though Tokyo Story (1953) is his masterpiece, this film marked the turning point in his career where his post-war style crystalized and the majority of his greatest films were made. Ozu had spent the majority of his films up to this point exploring generational conflict in Japanese families—mainly with The Great Depression as the back-drop. Starting with this film he would use the aftermath of WWII as the back-drop to exploring these conflicts and this movie set the tone of it involving a daughter being matched-up for marriage by her family. It all begins here with the story of a widower and his single daughter named Noriko.

The synopsis is that a widowed father and his young adult daughter Noriko are living happily together in post-WWII Japan. When an aunt decides that Noriko needs to get married before she gets "too old" (i.e. 30), it kicks-off the drama of the film as the daughter was happy were she was at and had no thought of getting married. The conflict is started by the aunt, but is really between the father and daughter as they struggle to understand their place in this "new" Japan. Though one could speculate what Ozu's thoughts on the characters' motivations, it never 100% certain who is truly right (though in the world of 2021 it would make more sense that the woman's opinion is the most important, this was not so in 1949). The ending is one of the most quietly devastating endings I have seen in a movie solidifying it as one of the great father-daughter movies. 

This film would kick-off the first of the many "Noriko" films of Ozu that would involve this female character (usually, but not always, played by Setsuko Hara) caught over whether she should get married (Hara would play a Noriko in Tokyo Story, but the circumstances of that movie are very different). These films would provide variations of Late Spring and some would be remakes. When Ozu found a story he liked, he stuck with it over-and-over. It is amazing how many angles he examined this topic from 1949 until his last film An Autumn Afternoon (1962).

We need to talk about the two main actors. Setsuko Hara was for Yasujiro Ozu what Toshiro Mifune was for Akira Kurosawa. She was Ozu's primary actor and no actor performed more dedicatedly for him than her. The father in the film is played by Chishū Ryū—who was for Ozu what Takeshi Shimura was for Akira Kurosawa. They were part of the Shochiku stock character ensemble. It is interesting to see these two actors, both established actors in the Japanese movie industry by 1949, as they were approaching their creative peaks. Ryu was, as always, playing a character older than he was since he was "old-looking" by design. 

Ozu was well-known by now for his camera-style and it is what most folks know about him at first glance. He shot most of his angles at near-ground level and he liked to put scene transition elipses in his movies. At this point he also had eliminated 99% of tracking shots in his movies. His career-long relationship with cinematographer Yūharu Atsuta helped make this style so iconic.

I don't know if more can be said on this film at this point. In a world where a woman's right over her body is still highly contested, this film was the beginning of Ozu's decade long examination of it in Japanese society. Though Ozu is certainly not the proto-feminist that his contemporary Kenji Mizoguchi was and definitely not the feminist that Kinoshita would turn-out to be in the early 1950s, he reflects part of a conversation that Japanese society was having in the post-WWII era about what place women (who got the franchise after the war) would have in it and what rights they could expect. 

My Review of The Inheritance (1962) directed by Masaki Kobayashi

 A year after completing one of the great epic achievements of epic cinema and Masaki Kobayashi was not done even a little at showing the dark side of Japanese society. The Japanese Economic Miracle had now officially begun in earnest and everybody was trying to get rich after thirteen years as a war-ravaged third world country. Though the war was over for most of Japanese society and its economy, one man was not through with showing his society how sick it was. This movie would be the last contemporary film or "Shomin-geki" by Kobayashi for 6 years. He would follow this film-up with one of his greatest–Harakiri–later that year. This a film that would set the tone of the more darker tone that emerged over the course of The Human Condition.

This story is as hardcore an allegory as Kobayashi could offer. A terrible industrialist is dying and decides to leave his fortune to his illegitimate offspring. His young wife and all his cronies decide to scheme him for as much they can. That is the movie in a nutshell. The point of the film is to show how each person sets about doing it and to analogize it for Japan at-large. This film maybe smaller in scope that The Human Condition, but it is as anti "feel good" as that film saga. There are no good people or heroic folks in this movie. It is a game of thrones of greed. Also, it is interesting to hear Toru Takemitsu doing a jazz score as oppose to a Western or Japanese classical score.

My Review of Where is the Friend's House? (1986) directed by Abbas Kiarostami

 I definitely needed to revisit the Iranian New Wave given all that's been happening in the world and my own life. This story is the first of Kiarostami's "Koker Trilogy" of movies that revolve around Koker, Iran. This first movie is a straight-forward neorealist film involving the protagonist trying to return the homework journal of his friend so that he does not get kicked out of school by his hard-ass teacher. There is no experimentation with the style here so I will talk mostly about the movie.

This movie is one of the last of Kiarostami's kid films where the protagonists are children and it is like a book-end of his second feature film The Traveler (1974). In the earlier film it was an evil little hellion that goes around looking for people to scam and goes on a journey only to get his poetic justice in the end. In this film it is a much more forthright kid who goes all over the province where he lives to find his school friend and return the book he picked up by mistake and the film also ends with poetic justice, but in a different way. Both films have jackass families, but this film sees the protagonist do right despite this while The Traveler's protagonist does the wrong thing. Where is the Friend's House?  makes you have to watch until the very end for the satisfying pay-off and just goes to show the beautiful humanism of the Iranian New Wave cinema at this time. A good ending can just make a film!

Eva is Done, FINALLY!! My Review of Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time (2021) directed by Hideaki Anno

 Thanatos - If I Can't Be Yours ("10 Years After Remix") by Loren & Mash

Finally!! After 14 years of these "Rebuild" films and 26 years of the franchise overall, Neon Genesis Evangelion has ended. This franchise has spanned nearly 2.5 generations of anime fans. I first heard of it when part of the original tv series was featured on Toonami's "Robot Week" back when I was still in grade school. Now I am way older I have seen everything and had to wait over a decade for this crazy, beautiful-looking, overloaded with pop-philosophy, glorious mess wrap-up. I'll let everybody else talk about the "message" behind this movie and the franchise as a whole (you have 25 years worth of that to read/watch), but I'll just try to give my very short takes on the movie and the franchise.

Everything You Ever Dreamed (Alternate Version) by Arriane

The movie is basically trying to one-up and undo the art and message of End of Evangelion (one of the most controversial films in anime history) respectively. The question that folks had going into the "Rebuild" films was is Hideaki Anno going to let Shinji & Co. have a happy ending compared to how the franchise originally ended in 1998 or was he going to screw them all again? Thankfully, he chose the former: let them have as happy an ending as possible and send them on their way. The story is very much what you expect from Eva, but the ending allows everyone to get on with their life. The true wonder of this movie is the visuals. This being the last Evnagelion property means that they went all out and it looks amazing, no other way to put it. The music likewise is pretty much what you expect and want from Shirō Sagisu at this point and his original music and the pop songs used in this film (both English and Japanese) are what you want from this franchise. On a different note: did you know that Sagisu made a British R&B/Hip-Hop album remixing his music from Eva to coincide with the release of EoE in 1998? It is official out-of-print, but you can find the whole album on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/evangelionvoxflac 

Promised Land (F-2) by Loren & Mash

While Shinji Ikari will always be one of my least favorite protagonists in fiction as a whole, this franchise pretty much re-wrote the rules of anime and is one of the most well-know properties this sides of the format. So much anime that we have now simply would not exist if a man did not think: "what would really happen if we put traumatized teens into giant 'robots' to fight supernatural aliens?" Well, 26 years later and I guess we have the answer...and it ain't just more fanservice.

One Last Kiss by Hikaru Utada

My Review of Seven Samurai (1954) directed by Akira Kurosawa

 Seven Samurai (1954) is one of the greatest movies of all time. It pretty much invented the language of the action film and the posse film. It is also one of my top 5 films. This is a film that ask what we fight for in life. This film takes place at the end of the Sengoku era as 100 years of disunited civil war was being replaced with unification and a re-establishment of feudalism under the samurai-class. According to the film, the action specifically takes place during 1587 when the Japanese government under Toyotomi Hideyoshi was involved in the Kyushu Campaign to unite the last of the main Japanese islands. While this is going on, a coalition of 7 ronin (master-less samurai) come together to defend a village from bandits. This movie is a swan song to the sort-of co-mingling of different social classes in Japan before the Tokugawa-era ends that forever. This movie has everything in it--it meditates on everything and it still is filled with action and drama. It was the start of Kurosawa's re-imagining of the samurai film and it is still the benchmark of any film that shows a bunch of heroes coming together to save the day.

As I stated in my review of Twenty-Four Eyes, 1954 was the greatest year in the history of Japanese cinema: if one made a list of every acclaimed Japanese film that year it would make an essential cinema list (Ozu missed out). The fact that this film was supposed to have come out a year earlier, but was delayed because the weather and Kurosawa's perfectionism was near-divine fate. While this film was ranked the third best film by Japanese critics for 1954, this has easily been the most celebrated film internationally of that year. 

When reviewing a film like this, one does not know where to begin or end so I'll just bring it all to a close here.

My Review of Muhammad Ali (2021) directed by Ken Burns, Sarah L. Burns, David McMahon

 This is one of the best, if not the best, of Ken Burns' biographical documentaries. This is also, production-wise, the most modern of Ken Burns' documentaries even compared to his Vietnam War documentary. It is an excellent introduction to the 21st century of the figure of Muhammad Ali. Ali was considered by many as one of the greatest athletes of the 20th Century. There have been infinite documentaries surrounding the life of Muhammad Ali examining every factor and detail imaginable. Including this doc, we've had three alone in the last 12 months (Sep 2021) so any new documentary had to be either be a very well intro or a doc that had some sort-of new info on Ali that no one has heard about in the last 44 years. This doc smartly went the route of the former and it has paid-off well.

This documentary uses the "Ken Burns style" with Ali masterfully. This doc in a way benefits from Ali's  own decades of myth-making by now having a template. The challenge for Burns & co. was sorting through the myth and showing the actual histories. Luckily we have quite a few people very close to Ali including his brother, 2nd & 3rd wives, and 2 of his daughters as well as a host of friends and associates and archival photos and films that help aid in this. If you are someone who is familiar with Ali's story than you will not learn anything new here, but if you are new to him or not very familiar to him than this is a perfect place to start. There will be hundreds of other documentaries to watch afterwards concerning him, but this may be the perfect starting place.

Shifting to the documentary itself, I have to say I was impressed at the new modern feel that it gave off. I had just watched Burns' previous documentary on Ernest Hemingway and it feels like the production went ten-fold into the future. This is the second documentary Ken Burns has done on a famous boxer after his excellent documentary on Jack Johnson the first black heavyweight boxing champion (who's legacy figures throughout this documentary). I'm not sure if it was the addition of his daughter and son-in-law as co-directors with Ken Burns (Burns was the primary producer and his son-in-law David McMahon was the head writer). For me, it was mainly the use of music that lifts this documentary. The incidental/filler music was made specifically for this  documentary by Jahlil Beats, while the musical selection consulted/curated by Peter Miller (the producer for Burns' Jazz doc) is possibly one of his best musical soundtracks ever for one of his documentaries. It elevated this documentary for me in a way that none of his docs have done since Jazz (the first Ken burns doc I ever watched). I also enjoyed hearing Keith David back as the narrator—a very appropriate choice here.

It is interesting seeing the evolution of Ken Burns' career from 1981 to now. When he first started, his documentaries were wedded to the romantic notions of America: the myths, the Dream. As he kept going and kept learning—and kept being held accountable when he dropped the ball, his willingness to look American history straight in the face and look at the ugly parts with as much passion as the pretty parts has made him a better film-maker and dare I say a better person. It is interesting to see how the same man who made The Civil War, made The Vietnam War. The guy who made the romanticized-documentary on Huey Long in 1985 made a 1000-times better one on Muhammad Ali. True evolution, true growth, true awakening of an artist. Just like Muhammad Ali.

Short thoughts on the Ken Burns' Hemingway documentary

It's always a bonus for me as both a cinephile and a bibliophile when I can talk about both at the same time. Unfortunately, not so much here as I have read only a few of Hemingway's short stories. I've never been really big into Hemingway and this documentary, while raising my interest some, has not done so much. I tend to be more into white modernist writers like Faulkner or Joyce. But I am sure I can muster up the strength for at least two Hemingway novels. Toni Morrison writes about Faulkner at length in her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination in-which she was trying to make an argument to read Hemingway with a very meta-critical eye, but it sort-of turned me off to the guy. This documentary confirmed to me that, indeed, Ernest Hemingway was a very terrible person who could write. 

As far as this documentary itself, it is what you would expect from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Their biographic documentaries all seem to follow the same 3-part pattern that they have perfected over the years. I have observed that there is sightly more archival non-Ken Burns interview footage used here than you usually see in a Ken Burns doc, but if you can use it, use it. I probably won't watch this doc again for a long time simply because the subject has no interest to me, but it is what I like in a Ken Burns doc style-wise.

My Goodreads Review of Eye Level by Jenny Xie

After this long hiatous of mine where I've been staggering alone in the wilderness, I'm making my way back to civilization. This review is just to get me back on the road. I really wish I was in a better frame-of-mind to analyze these poems, but that I was able to write any thing at all on it is a miracle. I'm honestly ambivalent on the book, but I can't quite pick-up why. I also use the word "interesting" a lot in this review: my apologies up-front.



Eye Level: Poems by Jenny Xie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"I've grown lean from eating only the past." - Line 9 of "Corfu"


I was supposed to have read this book in–at most–two weeks and then review it, but I ran out of inertia emotionally and spiritually and after almost 2.5 moths away I have finally finished it. This is an interesting book. It is the personal recollections of the author on her life and travels and of the writer. While it did not leave me speechless, it has a lot of good lines in it. I can't remember how I discovered this book, but I had been curious about reading it for awhile. Though I suppose the book is relevant given the news of the past year, it is an interesting travel diary/meditation all its own.

"Look at how I perform for you

Look at how you perform for me

An eye for an eye
is how you and I
take on forms in the mind" - stanza 13 of "Visual Orders"

I am always impressed at how poets are able to use words to create the scene in your mind's eye. The "mind's eye" is what this book is quite literally about and the poet makes references to the title throughout the book. Xie is looking back somberly on her life on the road and is put between nostalgia and melancholia (literally has a poem with that name). She thinks of her time as an immigrant in New York City's Chinatown and her travels throughout Southeast Asia great detail.

I hope I can convey that this is an interesting book to read for someone who likes to read poetry of different people's experiences. I know I am not doing a great job at describing the book because I am still a little bit rusty with my reviewing skills after 2 months. This was an interesting look at a life that could not be more different than my own. And did I mention it has a lot of good quotes.

As a bonus here is Jenny Xie's music poetry video for her poem "Chinatown Diptych": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2vUq...

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Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

 Ma Rainey by Sterling Brown

I've been thinking of what James Baldwin once said about artists being in-service to the people they represent. It is something that is often taken for granted, but such a responsibility exacts a great toll. This toll is even greater for black artists in the United States where one is so much more exploited and looked down upon than others. This play is about a black artist and her band coming to grip with this apartheid-exploitation, while at a recording session. The play takes place 100 years ago and was written in 1984, but all the complaints and debates of the band have been in the news for the last decade. 

The band is made up of a very diverse group of characters: a devout trombone player leads them, a philosophically-minded intellectual piano player, a nihilistic trumpeter that is convinced that he is the greatest artist of all of them there (including Ma Rainey) and the bass player who is the audience-surrogate and just wants to get this day over with. They are the backing band for Gertrude "Ma" Rainey one of the first professional blues singers and mentor to Bessie Smith. They spend the day of the recording session engaging in dialogues about their fates as black musicians and Rainey and her hot-headed trumpet player duel back-and-forth over everything including a chorus girl that Rainey is involved with (Rainey was bisexual). The setting of the play is Chicago rather than Pittsburgh where August Wilson's Century Cycle usually takes place. The setting does a great job at adding a layer of claustrophobia to the tensions that unfold at the recording session and the tensions between the trumpeter and everybody else ensures what type of play this will be (Chekhov would've been proud of how well Wilson executed everything). Historical fiction is always going to have its own complications, but I think August Wilson does an excellent job at it here.

 Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (The actual song.)

As to the film itself: it was a very vibrant film given the tension in it. Every single actor nailed it and the costume designer is to be commended. I expected the adaptation to be well given that this movie was produced by August Wilson acolyte Denzel Washington.  Viola Davis, Glynn Turman, and of course the late-Chadwick Boseman (in his final film performance) give spell-binding performances here. Though I can only imagined what this would've looked like on the big screen, I am still glad to have seen it.

Princess Mononoke (1997) directed by Hayao Miyazaki

 "I am not attempting to solve the entire world's problems. There can never be a happy ending between humanity and ferocious gods. Yet, even amidst hatred and carnage, life is still worth living. It is possible for wonderful encounters and beautiful things to exist. I will depict animosity, but that is in order to show the fact that there is something more precious. I will depict the bondage of a curse in order to show the joy of liberation. What I will show is the boy reaching an understanding of the girl, and the process of the girl's heart opening up to the boy. In the end the girl may say to the boy, 'I love you, Ashitaka. But I can't forgive human beings.' The boy will smile and say, 'that's alright. Won't you live together with me?' 

This is the kind of film I want to make." – Hayao Miyazaki's April 19, 1995 pitch for Princess Mononoke

 

How The Sun First Rose on "Japan"

This film is neck-and neck with Castle in the Sky (1986) for my favorite Hayao Miyazaki film. This film was the first of many of Miyazaki's "final films." This film has one of the fiercest female protagonist of his his movies up to that point and along with Miyazaki's environmentalist themes, had a strong look at Shinto spirituality and an amazing allegory of the founding of that country that we call Japan.

An Emishi boy, a civilization of Yamato settlers and iron workers led by a female warlord who is an amazing call-back to the female antagonist of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), and the various forest kami–especially wolf kami–that have taken a human girl dressed in Jōmon-era clothes as their own interlock with each other over the land and each other's existence during the early Muromachi period. From these three mutually-hostile groups will be the creation of we now call "Japan." San aka the titular Princess Mononoke represents not simply the natural world but, pre-historic Japan at it's roots—symbolized by her Jōmon clothes; the antagonist Lady Eboli represents represents the contradictions of modern civilization and the brutality of the Yamoto conquest of the islands that they would call Nippon: she's kind to all the outcast of that era of society, but she takes all her rage on the land and the kami that live in it. In the middle is the co-protagonist Ashitaka who represents the Emishi not so ancient as the Jōmon, but one of the ethnic groups that resisted easy assimilation or subjugation to the Yamoto hegemony: they were until the end (or beginning depending on how you look at it) of the Muromachi period offering an alternative to what we now think of as "Japanese culture" on the main island of Japan—much closer to the land than the Yamoto, but still a human civilization. This movie reminds me of Maya Angelou's On The Pulse of the Morning, but in a Japanese context. Nobody has a reason to trust one another—and all the reasons to destroy each other. But it is shown in  the little moments that when they do work and relate to each other with compassion, they can make great things happen. Tragically greed, prejudice, and a simple lack of understanding means that history will eventually play out…as tragedy.

It is amazing how beautiful the artwork is here—95% hand-drawn (this was the first Studio Ghibli film to use CGI). Miyazaki closed out the 20th century (and what he thought was his career) with this film: Princess Mononoke is a true masterpiece of not simply anime, but animation cinema as a whole. There wouldn't be another film of this caliber for me until Your Name (2016) almost 20 years later.

Twenty-Four Eyes (1954) directed by Keisuke Kinoshita

 Hotaru Koi by Sekiya Toshiko

This is the first film I have seen by film-maker Keisuke Kinoshita and as far as first impressions go, this is a good one. I knew that Kinoshita was a contemporary of Akira Kurosawa and like Kurosawa made propaganda films for the Fascist government of WWII-era Japan. Also like Kurosawa, he turned decidedly leftward after the war and made many films criticizing the fascist government including this film. While Kinoshita would never find the same popularity outside of Japan as Kurosawa, he was massively popular inside of Japan during and after the war. If you asked any cinephile outside of Japan what the best Japanese film or film in-general of 1954 was you would certainly get Seven Samurai, yet Twenty-Four Eyes was the consensus pick by Japanese critics for 1954.

Twenty-Four Eyes is an interesting historical epic because it documents The Great Depression and World War II not through the eyes of famous Japanese figures or even politically-active dissidents like Akira Kurosawa's No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), but a school-teacher and her first 12 students on the eve of the Depression. It follows them as both the economic downturn and the rise of fascism hits there rural island. All of them would suffer during this time and the war would be the ultimate disaster for them all. The film is a typically 1950s melodrama, but the way it handles how these larger historical forces affected this little area is what admire about this film. While it is a bittersweet film, it still has some hope for tomorrow and contains a possible jab at Bicycle Thieves (1948) of all things at the end. 

1954 was a big year for Japanese films—seriously. The fact that Kinoshita has two critically-praised releases (along with Kenji Mizoguchi) tells how good he was. This film also is more of what I consider a true feminist film as oppose to the films of Mizoguchi which I consider proto-feminist.

Sounder (1972) directed by Martin Ritt

 I wasn't planning on reviewing this movie before February, but with the death of Cicley Tyson (1/282021), I changed plans. This movie is a beautiful almost-mystical film about love and endurance. It's a Hollywood neorealist film that looks at a family that endures in rural Louisiana during the worst of The Great Depression and American apartheid. Paul Winfield plays a father living under a blatant kleptocracy who decides to go to desperate measures to feed his family and is thrown into prison. This leaves his wife played by Tyson in one of her greatest roles hold the family down through crooked-bosses, the police, and the judicial system that was blatantly rigged. As she keeps the family together on this front her son, played by Kevin Hooks, goes in search of his father as the white officials have refused to tell them where he was taken to. He goes on this journey that really becomes more about his future than simply searching for his father accompanied by his dog: the titular character Sounder.

The dog becomes the symbol of the families struggle and triumph. Despite the hardships and brutal struggle that is dished out to them all, they somehow survive and overcome it. The ending of this movie is one of the most beautiful and moving in cinema; Sounder is a film that becomes a rewarding experience to watch each time. All the praise given to it is well-earned and few films have been made with the same genuine earnestness.

Boy (1969) "少年" directed by Nagisa Oshima

 This is the most "accessible" of Oshima's work and was my introduction to the Japanese New Wave proper. Osima's work totally destroys the line between New Wave and Exploitation cinema, but this is his most tamed work. This is a film about a Japanese couple that fakes car accidents to scam people and get their son, the titular "Boy", in on the job. It is a crazy look and commentary on the paradoxes of Japanese families at this time using an actual incident as the model. While this film is no 400 Blows, it is decent for what it is.

It Must Be Heaven (2019) directed by Elia Suleiman

 After the ending of The Time That Remains (2009), I thought that Elia Suleiman had said everything he wanted to say in regards to the fate of Palestinians in The Holy Land. I mean despite the brief optimism of the Arab Spring, things got much worse and Israel's occupation of the West Bank and its blockade of Gaza have been total. With the majority of Arab states no longer ignoring it diplomatically or opposing it, Israel can now treat the Palestinians any way they want with no threat of recourse. It seems Suleiman has recognized this too, so after 30 minutes of the audience catching up with him after 10 years (his mom has died―the last recognizable person of his first 3 films), and with his Palestinian neighbors looking like characters from The Iceman Cometh, he decides to leave. Suleiman's first feature film sees him come into Palestine from exile in New York City and Europe and now he is taking the reverse journey.

We first see him, after an interesting plane ride, in Paris just in time for Bastille Day celebrations. He finds Paris intriguing and very welcome change of pace (we find out interestingly that Suleiman, like Akira Kurosawa, is an ass man). We then see how the charm of Paris quickly fades to bewilderment at the culture change takes him by surprise (this is an actual thing called...Paris Syndrome). It should be noted that Suleiman is still playing his actual-self, so people recognize him as a film-maker throughout the film and he is often doing things concerning his film projects in this film (in this way, this film bares a big resemblance to Chantel Akerman's The Meeting's of Anna (1978)). We also can't miss the commentary of a man inspired by Jacques Tati making a film in Paris. But of course we have to move on to New York City.

Well, upon reaching Trump-era America...it is a trip. Besides being treated as invisible or passive aggressively-like in Paris his first interaction after not being in the USA since the 1990s is a taxi driver who is amazed at actually meeting a Palestinian (his second as we learn). He goes to a grocery store and is shocked that everyone in the store has a gun (this is not something you'd see in New York City, but if he was down South it would certainly be accurate) and it is a hilariously over-the-top scene. Once we get to Central Park the tone for this section of the film is set. The diversity of the city is unlike anything seen in Nazareth or Paris; the mania is also very uniquely NYC. After seeing all the folks with their weapons in the earlier scene we see a Palestinian woman engaged in a protest and is immediately swarmed by NYPD: the scene is very reminiscent of Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996). More call backs from 'Chronicles' come when we see his various speaking engagements in an art school and a Palestinian-American conference. We get a brief meeting of Suleiman with Gael García Bernal and a meeting with a fortune teller over the destiny of Palestine. 

After he finishes his stay in NYC, he goes back home a little happier and a little wiser, he realizes that at this point-in-time, there is no point leaving Palestine, because the world has become Palestine. It is a bittersweet realization, but a hopeful one for Suleiman.

New Year

 I decided my first post on here of this new year would be a non-review. New government in power in here in the United States, but the plague has been going as strong as ever. We've gone a step closer to the end of the republic, but these things never happen all at once. I have no idea what more I'll be doing with this blog beyond what I've been doing, but I'll see as I go along.