Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week DOUBLE FEATURE: Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis! and Melody of the World!

Article theme: Speed of Life - David Bowie

Every list of "great films" features Soviet propaganda staple Man with a Movie Camera as its token silent, and it still makes for impressive viewing if, like an absolute pleb, you've never seen a city symphony before. Too bad it's a complete ripoff of experimental genius Walther Ruttmann's German kino Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, which dropped two years earlier and deserves all the credit for the template. Not that Berlin was the first city symphony of the silent era: 1921 short Manhatta mixed documentary footage of Manhattan with lame poetry, and Berlin itself was profiled in 1925's Die Stadt der Millionen. But Ruttmann's opus ditched intertitles altogether and took on the structure of a day, building from isolated trains at empty stations through the bleary mornings of street sweepers and paper deliverers through the explosive, swirling nightlife of a decadent metropolis.

We even drop in to the Tiergarten where this elephant siestas in the afternoon.

While Man with a Movie Camera features laughably clunky propaganda of young comrades shooting at cutouts labelled things like "UNCLE FASHISM", Berlin spells out no agenda, passes no didactic judgement on any particular subject. You can read into it whatever bullshit has been programmed into you, or simply view it as a frozen moment in history. Ruttmann followed up Berlin with the more wildly ambitious Melody of the World, which likewise sequenced clips as movements in a symphony without taking any particular stance toward its multifarious subjects. Melody combines footage from as far afield as "Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States of America, Holland, Greece, India, Siam, China, Japan, Panama, and Cuba", and packs in some kino match cuts beside its startling, intriguing and exotic depictions of recreations, fashions, religions, customs, conflicts, architecture and languages around the globe.

In fact, the only wholesome messagerino to slap you hard in the face is an earnest lament against the ugliness of war. Ruttmann would later serve as a frontline combat photographer and died tragically in the worst war of all, whose only purpose was to give today's warpigs rhetorical cover for their murderous crimes.

If it's so trite and unsubtle, how come you still haven't got the message?

But violence is only presented as one frayed thread marring the complex tapestry of life. The juxtaposition of images of comparable routines and rituals from different countries highlights as many differences as similarities, and renders the familiar as novel as the alien. The whole thing only further demonstrates how much more profoundly the love of humanity and curiosity about the world runs in problematic shitlords than in shitlib NPCs for whom travel pays off in status points among their bougie social cliques, to say nothing of how many wildly distinctive authentic cultures were still practiced less than a century ago, even in Europe.

I have no idea who these guys are but their Wayne's World headbanging routine is on point.

What does this guy write on his umbrella, and why? I don't know, and no voiceover or intertitle interrupts the moment to explain it.

Ruttmann has fun with the Kuleshov effect, splicing blatantly unrelated clips together to make it seem like the Monopoly guy was watching Southeast Asian Lordi rock the stage. The Kuleshov effect is understood intuitively by all template meme poasters, but clearly Kuleshov was so convinced it was his master breakthrough that it bears his name to this day, which is endearingly like if I dubbed 2+2=4 "Pat Bastard's Formula" or some shit.

And if Berlin and Melody constitute the perfection of montage cinéma, Ruttmann's early experiments like Lichtspiel Opus I-IV confidently blazed trails down which still other poseurs strolled, taking credit that was never theirs. Sure, they sort of look like screensavers now, but Ruttmann was so far ahead of the curve that everyone from his contemporary absolute-film dickriders to Stan Brakhage belong in a footnote to his bio. Use this knowledge to them-apples would-be hipster blowhards in your next /film/ flame war.

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Stayvun Goes to Hell: The Final Friday!

Today is a very special day, when Jason's birthday actually falls on Friday the 13th. Unfortunately, I already recapped all the Friday the 13th movies, so here's a Stayvunpoast instead. No, this has nothing to do with Friday the 13th, but then neither did the Friday the 13th TV show, so consider this a 4D clever meta-commentary on that.

Happy birthday, Jason!!!1

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Sky's The Limit!

Article theme: War - Edwin Starr

"Psst - Fred, don't look now but I think you're featured on Pat Bastard's blðg again."

Not only the best and most overlooked Hollywood musical, but also the greatest accidentally anti-war movie of all time, it's too obvious a pun to call RKO's 1943 opus The Sky's The Limit Fred Astaire's shining hour (because that is the title of its main theme song), but I just did, so now what, bitch?

Actually, I'm assuming it was unintentional - even a kino factory like RKO wouldn't have dared commit a major star like Astaire to a based isolationist peacenik project at the height of the hostilities - but, just as every Hollywood attempt to marry pozzed messaging with actual artistic talent ends in divorce, so too this effort to keep proto-neocon support for the worst and most destructive war in history high undermines itself so hard you might just start to wonder.

Never forget that the same balding twinks who smirk media literately over the ebin propaganda satire in Starship Troopers also soyface into lockjaw over the Holy War Against Fashism based on this sort of farcically corny agitslop.

Astaire plays Fred (perhaps a clue that this complex character is closer to the real him than his typically airy persona), a fighter ace directed to perform a PR tour from coast to coast on his fleeting leave from the Pacific theatre who goes AWOL instead. The reason suggested is just boredom with his obligations and a yen for anonymity in a country that sees him as a hero for killing le ebil Japs, but this is surface level motivation. Disaffection with the whole war fits better and is supported by the scenes where Fred berates an aeronautical tycoon over the fitness of his aircraft for combat purposes at an obsequious works party in his honour. Through this point he's been a charming prankster, trying to lose himself in the escapism of civilian life, but in this scene his unloading becomes impassioned, showing-without-telling of psychological scars a studio propaganda flick of the period would otherwise have swept under the rug.

"Young man, what are you saying?"
"Look, personally I just prefer allies who don't sink our ships, send letter bombs to the White House, bomb our buildings and frame the Muslim Brotherhood for it, buy all our politicians and run pedo blackmail rings on our own soil."
"I simply won't hear such Woke Right Anti-Semolina-Pudding! Out I say!" - actual dialogue.

But the unravelling of Fred is gradual, a calendar in which he ticks off the days of his dwindling leave acting like those clocks in Rumble Fish, reminding us of the time elapsing before his freedom runs out, serving as a minimalistic motif to keep the rude awakening ahead in mind throughout the dream that plays out for us in between. First Fred goes looking for romance, and finds it by inventing photobombing and otherwise trolling Joan Leslie's qt3.14 photographer into falling for his impish charms.

Remember, boys: if she never looks at you like this...

...She'll never look at you like this.

It's a great romance of the cinéma and our foreknowledge of its doomed fate only makes it more poignant and none the less enjoyable as comic entertainment. Crack all the celluloid-closet jokes you will about our Fred, his chemistry with Leslie speaks of straightness you or I can but aspire to (well, you, anyway). Nor can we deny the sack required to smash his "One For My Baby And One For The Road" routine, in which the great danceman opened a leg shattering glass this way and that in an outpouring of sorrow as primal as it is precise. "Can't act" my taint, guy who wrote his infamous first screen test notes, this is a performance physical and emotional that mogs the talents of every pretentious thespian ever to don tights and also unrelatedly play Shakespeare.

On this b└og we stan a STRAIGHT king.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Demolition Man!

The lunch lady at St Pat's Primary School (1995, colourised).

Everyone loves Demolition Man, the greatest Stallonekino and one of the more entertaining movies of the 90s, or, indeed, ever. John Spartan (Stallone) is cryogenically frozen after a run-in with arch-criminal Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes). Flash forward to the far future of 2032 (we've still got time!) and Los Angeles is now transformed into the peaceful utopia of San Angeles. But is all as it seems? No!!!

"Somehow...Phoenix returned" - not actual dialogue.

For some mysterious reason Phoenix is sprung from Ice Block C and proceeds to wreak havoc on a world that has evolved beyond violence, and thus has no idea how to handle it. Snipes, utterly wasted in lame hero roles in other flicks, is gr8 fun as the homicidal psychopath finding to his bemusement and subsequent glee that this brave new world is his brave new oyster.

Basedly, the Hall of Violence has the same font as the menus in Diablo II.

Just watching Phoenix go around bullying the bewildered quokka-folk of San Angeles would be entertainment enough, but beaming uniformed waifu Lt. Huxley (lol) (Sandra Bullock, a revelation before everyone got tired of her bullshit five minutes later) has the bright idea to revive Stallone and sic him on the risen Phoenix.

Cute!

But also...

Hilarity ensues as Spartan must learn to navigate a world of feeble law enforcement, strange technologies and social taboos like an autist in the real world. The fish-out-of-water is a time-worn formula for entertainment and the pairing of Stallone's jaded old-school action hero and Bullock's wide-eyed retro-junkie also makes this technically a buddy-cop flick, meaning it relies as much on their chemistry as the gimmick.

Judging by this look and the snail trail she leaves behind her, we're in safe hands.

Much has been made of the social satire element, but, like most satires, it's as much a time-capsule today as Stallone's character is in the 2032 of the film's setting. Sure, the notion of an overly-polite high-trust society being immunocompromised against exploitation by violent criminal scumbags is as relevant now as it ever was, but the gentle lampooning of late-80s/early-90s political correctness culture makes the classic blunder of assuming good faith from its proponents. Flash forward to now and it's abundantly apparent that those who promulgate politically correct standards and shibboleths are as much cluster-B manipulators and psychopaths as Phoenix, and their risible goofiness is little more than a veneer for squalid self-advancement on the heads of those less slick of tongue and short of integrity. Though there are hints...

This dude dressed like if a Japanese chick became Pope might be significantly cast: he played the smooth-talking bureaucrat in Yookay TV's Yes, Minister.

Is the V-shaped SAPD badge design a subtle nod to INGSOC's curiously hash tag inclusive logo? You decide!

But whether you read surface-level whimsicality or deeper, darker subtext into it, this kino crushes as pure entertainment. WILL Spartan curtail Phoenix's rise? CAN he solve the three seashells? WAS Sandra Bullock really likable? Find out!!! Watch Demolition Man today!

"Imma Chargin My Laser!" - actual dialogue.