Movies

My parents gave me an Amazon.com gift certificate for Christmas this year, ostensibly for school books. I went on there and realized VHS movies cost like 3.50 a pop, since they generally cost about 1 dollar plus 2.50 shipping. And we talkin’ good movies. The best movies cost the least. Here is a list of movies that have arrived at my door so far:

Kanal. Dir. Andrzej Wajdah. I’d heard of this director through a movie he made about the French Revolution, Danton, which many people excluding French leftists thought was a great film (it didn’t pull the party line). He’s a Polish director, and narrated the FR through the lense of Solidarity, the Polish union which had opposed the Soviet Union during the 80’s.

Nosferatu. Dir. Murnau. Apparently this is the first vampire movie ever made. Not that that was why I ordered it.

Ingmar Bergman: Smiles of a Summer Night, Hour of the Wolf, Shame.

Fritz Lang: Metropolis

I started watching this today. This shows traces of the Wellsian, especially the scene where the workers are meeting in the catacombs beneath their city (which is beneath the real city), and the boss is watching and scheming..

Alexander Nevsky. Dir. Eisenstein. I’ve seen Battleship Potemkin on the big screen, and lived with Strike! for a few days while writing a paper about a 30 second scene. Hopefully this one won’t disappoint.

Kurosawa: Sanjuro. Haven’t seen it. From reading the back, I believe it’s a Cervantes-like caricature of the Samurai film.

The Lower Depths. This is a reenactment of Gorky’s play. I watched the beginning the other day, but it was late in the night, and I don’t remember much, except that it seemed like a badass movie, and I look forward to watching it more attentively.

The Diary of a Chambermaid. Dir. Buñuel. This is one of the only ones I’ve had time to watch. GREAT movie! A domestic servant, played by Jeanne Moreau, arrives at a town in Normandy to find a job with a certain family. This family turns out to have all kinds of bizarre fetishes hiding behind the bourgeois rigidity à l’extérieur.

Variety Lights. This one looks very Fellini.

I got another Fritz Lang film: You Only Live Twice. He made this one in the US. It’s got Silvia Sidney and Henry Fonda. I have yet not to be blown away by a film either directed or associated in some way with Fritz Lang, so this one will hopefully live up to my expectations.

Indiscretion of an American Wife. Vittorio de Sica. 1 American woman. 1 Italian man. 1 train station.

Andrei Rublev by Tarkovsky.
This is one of the top 5 movies I have ever seen. An epic film, it is something of a Gogol novel, with Dostoevskian conversations between characters (What is discussed? God, evil, life, death, work, art, paganism, among other topics). Tarkovsky tried to encompass all of Russia during the 15th century, in a way that encompassed all of Russia period. The acting is (I searched for a word for a while but only found) seemingly spontaneous. I don’t know why acting isn’t as convincing now as it is in these Russian films. In the beginning of the movie there is a scene in a bar where a jester does his act in front of a bunch of men, and this guy really seems to be improvising. Someone gives him a cup of beer, he downs it, looks at it for a moment, and then places it on his head. This gesture was so innocently carried out that it seemed like he had just thought of it on the spot, or rather, hadn’t thought it up, but just did it, just acted. He dances around the room with various props, making the men laugh, mocking everyone including himself. There are many scenes like this in the film, which capture something film rarely captures. Not only that, but the film seems to get better and better as it goes on. Neither French nor American film has anything to compare to this; the techniques used by Tarkovsky are pretty conventional, besides exceptionally long takes, but the film has an aura which no review could convey. I was thinking after the movie: How would I describe the beauty of this film? My answer is that I can’t. One must see this film for me to begin to talk meaningfully about it. See it. You won’t be disappointed. Same goes for another Tarkovsky film, Solaris, a science fiction film about a group of Soviet astronauts who have been sent to a planet where there is believed to be intelligent life, and have set up a space station, only to find out there is a lake on the planet which is not only conscious, but is conscious of their thoughts. The lake enters their consciousness, searching for those parts of their memory where there has been something left behind that disturbs them, and casts an image of what it found in order to communicate with them. What is the lake trying to show them? Good lord, what do I know of such things?

Politics

It sounds dissonant talking about a revolution these days, does it not? Who in their right mind entertains the idea that there may one day be a REVOLUTION? I used to be more of a radical than I am now. Nowadays, I’m a radical in word only. I haven’t been to a protest since 2003, right before Bush and the coalition of the willing attacked Iraq. I don’t know if I’ll go to another; it was good to add my presence to the mass of people marching through the streets, and I’m proud to have gone to that protest, but I felt a little silly chanting all the slogans. “1, 2, 3, 4, we don’t want your dirty war!” That one sounds like something a cheerleader would shout before the big game. Other people were shouting “Vive la France!”, since Chirac was acting all righteous about the American cowboys, and everyone apparently thought it was a coincidence that France had all kinds of oil deals cut with Hussein. The problem is I’m a little too cynical for these rallies.

However naive and simplistic they were, they’ve been vindicated by what’s happened in Iraq. I remember turning on the supposedly left-leaning CNN after I got back from DC to watch a bunch of scum pundits talking about all the anti-war violent extremist radicals, with shots of some kid throwing rocks. Where was this kid? Who was throwing rocks? I was there all day. I didn’t witness one violent action. I did see a bunch of police officers lined up with riot gear on horses, looking on calmly behind their helmet visors. But CNN, when covering the protests, shows some kid throwing a rock through a window.

CNN seems to lean to the left when there are profits to be made. But everyone’s a bit more ballsy since America gave her official “F” to the president in November. Kind of like a journal I’ve been reading since last year, The New Republic, which is a sad, sad case. Apparently this is like the Detroit Tigers of journalism, minus the 2006 season. The 2006 season for TNR sucked just as much as the last 18 seasons. I’m not going to go into all the details. There are actually plenty of journalists at TNR whose work I read and enjoy. However, every time there’s a major event in America, these guys are wrong in their prediction of the outcome.

1. Iraq. These guys apparently gave their support to Bush and company back in the day; I’m sure most of them portrayed the anti-war lefties as a bunch of extremists out of touch with reality. Some of them still do. Anyway, they were wrong. Martin Peretz, who bought the magazine a few decades ago, uses TNR to spew out hate-speech, passing it off as journalism, which he can do since he, well, he owns TNR. If you learned about the the Israeli-Palestinian conflict solely through him, you would think that the Israeli army is the underdog angelic civilisation-bringing colonial benefactor of Palestine, whereas the Palestinians have blood-tipped devil horns growing underneath their keffiyehs. The situation is bit more complicated. There are no good guys, no bad guys. It’s a big mess. Of course the victims aren’t necessarily the good guys, but things are pretty damn twisted over there on the eastern tip of the Med. Most of TNR has now had a change of heart about the Iraq war (except Peretz, who still writes blog entries about how the Iraqis are better off now, blah blah blah). But the only people who believe this war was a good idea are the hardest most unquestioning neo-cons. A recent CBS poll found that Bush has a 30% approval rating. He’s approaching Nixon, dad gummit!

2. The New York Yankees were picked to beat the Detroit Tigers pretty much unanimously by Spencer Ackerman* and the rest of the people on their comment board, until about Game 3 in the playoffs this year. We can’t really hold this against them: there weren’t after all anti-Yankee protests all over the world for them to blow off and label left-wing extremists.

3. The day before the 2006 elections, TNR published an article entitled “Why the Democratic tidal wave will amount to a ripple.”

What big events in the last few years have they been right about? I can’t think of a single one. Anyway, I’ve always got political bullshit going on in back of my thoughts, as little as possible in the foreground, so I thought I’d write an entry about some polical bullshit! And there you have it.

*This was neverless a great journalist on the TNR team. He would write articles which mentioned Arabs as humans, and not a mob of fanatic Islamist savages bent on destroying the Occident. He was fired, ostensibly due to eccentric behavior. Spencer is also a Yankee fan, so he can be forgiven his faulty logic concerning the 2006 playoffs.

Non amo te, Walmarte, et possum dicere qua re..

My brother gave me some velcro shoes. He couldn’t believe I actually wanted them. He was like “Dude, they’re velcro.” I was like “Dude, I know.” He got them from Walmart, so I was like, “Sweet, I get free shoes, and I don’t have to contribute to Walmart.” Then I went out to walk my dog in my new shoes. I started thinking about Walmart. I thought to myself “You know what, self? If there were a terrorist attack on Walmart, late at night, when there were no employees, so no one got hurt, I think I would support that! Furthermore, the crater left in the ground, the bits and pieces of monotone grey Walmart bricks, the shattered blue letters of the Walmart sign, the twisted up shopping carts, the melted cash registers, all of that shit littering the ground would warm my bleeding heart! I would roast marshmellows over the smoking rubble. I would voice my support for that terrorist attack, self! Even if it was pulled off by some Islamist fanatic.” But then I thought, hmm. Four things RE: said terrorist attack.
1. What about the pet department? What about the hamsters? How could I support a terrorist attack which included hamsters as collateral damage? Hell no. I would not stand for this. Granted, they’re probably genetically modified hamsters, running around on their wheels twice as fast as organic hamsters, but genetically modified hamsters are sentient beings! I would only support this benevolent act of terrorism by the mom & pop shop jihad brigade if they first broke into Walmart, took the hamsters, mice, fish, and iguanas Walmart has enslaved, blew the joint to smithereens, and then either returned the petits animaux to their natural habitats or let them run free around the house.
2. “Terrorism” is a misnomer, since no one would be harmed. Fear would not be the goal, but destruction of something that should never have existed. Is Walmart better than the Gulag? Of course it is, but that doesn’t mean that not having Walmart necessarily entails a Gulag. This would be aimed at the methods of profit of this gigantic behemoth of evilness that censors its CDs in one aisle and sells guns in the next. If enough of these stores get blown up, they would not make the profits which keep them running. If only it were so simple. Unfortunately, there are probably guards who could get hurt, which is unacceptable, so they’d have to kidnap the guards with waterguns and take them outside with the hamsters before lighting the fuse. Not to mention the fact that Americans would probably start purposely shopping at Walmart to “show the terrorists we won’t back down,” calling people who don’t shop at Walmart unpatriotic, and all the other absurdities that go with a populace that is living proof of the tyranny of ignorance. But if not, I would be breaking out my Anarchist Cookbook at this very moment!
3. Mawlrat is an anagram of Walmart. What’s that? You think this is a coincidence? Did I ever tell you I find you charmingly naïve?
4. Jobs will probably be lost because of this. But when I think about all the jobs this bloated beast spewing out cultural barf has destroyed in order to bring its bland low-priced shit to every nook and cranny of our country and soon the world, I think that bombing them would be productive in the long run. I read an article the other day about Walmart setting up a few stores in India. What do you say to that, except that this company should be humanely bombed. Yes, I meant for a period to end that sentence. Humanely as in no deaths, but complete destruction of the infrastructure. Every godforsaken store in one night, when no one is there. And if posting this brings CIA agents to my front door one day, so be it. “Humane terrorism.” This is my prescription for the world’s ills. Sorry, but this is what I believe. Of course I would never bomb anything, but to be honest, if someone did in this way, I would support it. End rant.

P.S. No, I don’t support terrorist groups, whether Palestinian, American, Al-Qaeda, whatever. I do reserve the right to blow up Walmart in my mind.

P.P.S. Yes, I realize the irony of the fact that I am willing to wear shoes procured from a store I would prefer annihilated. I will gladly blow up my shoes the day of the untelevised revolution. (as well as the rest of my clothes, if it’s that kind of revolution)