Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Alamo!

Article theme: The Yellow Rose of Texas/The Eyes of Texas  - Elvis Presley

Because by any other metric it's great, the risible angle John Wayne h8ers have to take toward his epic masterpiece is that it is historically inaccurate on several counts, which puts it in the company of every single movie ever based on an historical event.

Everyone knows the real Crockett waterskied everywhere on two alligators.

I mean, did the Iliad faithfully capture the factual details of every moment of the Trojan war? There is a case to be made that movies should have to disclose their deviations from true events, but if you think this is anywhere near the worst offender, or that its purview is actually history and not myth, you need to put down the crack pipe. The facts are simply that 200-odd men stood against 7000, knowing defeat was inevitable, to buy time for General Sam Houston's army to escape north and lick itself into shape to claim the territory from the grasp of Antonio López de Santa Anna.

Who would win? I mean, yeah, actually it's the second lot, but it's the thought that counts.

"MaKe TeXaS mExIcO aGaIn" squealers can cope and seethe; if anything, Wayne's romantic narrative is too kind to Santa Anna, who didn't even bother to dispute the charge of despotism laid at his foot, went around calling himself the Mexican Napoleon, and was so narcissistic-slash-bug-fuck-insane he once held a funeral with full military honours for his amputated leg. Despite being an absolute cartoon, Santa Anna was reinstated three times by various disgruntled factions in old Méjico in between periods of exile for fucking everything up, only to fuck everything up again. His legacy is losing Texas because he was as incompetent as he was megalomaniacal. Yet Wayne - himself a boogeyman for his pinko detractors - was uninterested in the farcical demonology that would inevitably result from a proper treatment of the not-so-great dictator, showing more warmth and empathy for the enemy troops than any lib has ever mustered for someone who so much as called him a fag on 4Chan:

Much of the drama at the film's core is derived from clashing personalities under the pressure of imminent death. Richard Widmark plays Jim Bowie rough and ornery, Laurence Harvey plays Will Travis with a huge stick up his ass, and the Duke himself plays Davy Crockett straight down the middle, a canny diplomat who speaks the language of the rough-and-ready volunteers and the distinguished men of state with equal fluency. Charges of caricature could be levied by fanboys of any colonel of the three, but as a dramatic dynamic it keeps what might be a dull wait sparking with uncertainty, internal conflict and odd-couple humour. There's even a subplot in which Wayne trolls some glory-supporting merchant trying to pressure a young Latina hottie (Linda Cristal) into marriage, before packing her off to safety in old-timey chivalric fashion.

The character is listed in the credits as "Sausage Fest Disruptor", which I personally felt was just a little on-the-nose.

The fact you know from the jump everyone dies at the end (spoilars!!1) makes it all the more vital to pack the early scenes with endearing nonsense of this genre. You'll feel cheated of a whole series of Wayne-as-Crockett adventures, to the point of forgetting Wayne played Wayne in everything he ever made, which is quite the achievement for his 5,475th film. Moreover, he surrounds himself with such a strong cast of oddball minor characters that no scene passes without robust populist humour and pathos. Wayne sank $1,500,000 of his own money into the project, and his palpable love of the heroes outshines any question of intended disrespect. The Alamo is the siege classic to which misguided Zulu fans might best be gently redirected.

Roll call at an average Texas school (2025, colourised).

Contrary to what decades of character assassination might have you believe, the ideals for which the Duke actually stood were downright naïve in their let's-all-get-along would-be moderate-centrism.

In real life republics as a system are best characterised as utterly immunocompromised against destabilisation by l*ft-wing psychopaths, at which point the best-case scenario is that a Franco steps in to salvage the nation at the cost of many lives, and in the very worst cases you get a Mao. I have no faith in Wayne's dream, but perhaps, like Plato's own Republic, it's something that can only be truly realised beyond the confines of this world. For Wayne, that dream was one worth sharing. In his utter, naked earnestness, he gave a fitting tribute to the men who died for that impossible dream.

Stop Motion Dreams: One Million Years BC!

Article theme: Back to the Cave - Lita Ford

Grugkino One Million Years BC opens with the cavemen of the Rock Tribe catching a wild hog in a pit trap. As they make off with their prize, an old grampa they brought along because ???? falls into the hole, and they leave him there for the vultures. This made me laugh for the rest of the movie.

"I've fallen and I can't get up!"
"..."

Upon returning to their home cave, some gruglennial yeets a rock at another caveboomer, making this the most brutal elder abuse kino since that Biden debate.

"Listen here, Jack, you just walk right in the front door, give the manager a firm handshake, and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Why, when I was at Woodstock..."

The remainder of the runtime is likewise comprised of random violence, partly because the characters can only speak in grunts and a handful of made-up grugspeak words, and partly because it was a Hammer production, and to Hammer everything looked like nails. Anyway, Tumak (our nominal hero, but it's a relative term) gets exiled from the tribe and finds himself wandering the prehistoric wastes, where he bumps into things like this:

Could be a dinosaur.

And this:

Oh come on, that's an iguana.

Eventually he makes it to the ocean, where he meets Racquel Welch (Fantastic Voyage) and her Shell Tribe. At first I thought they were all women, making them the Clam Tribe, but it turns out they have men too, meaning you can use that joke in your own parody.

The 1960s hairdos are so funny to me. If they remade this today, they'd all have those half-shaved cuts and the men would all have zoomer perms.

They take Tumak in and nurse him back to health, BUT MEANWHILE at the Rock Tribe cave, this dude seizes power by Mufasa'ing another old man off a cliff.

Day of the Pillow (1,000,000 BC, colourised).

This is a very important plot point, because when Tumak eventually returns to his home cave, he will now be fighting a different guy than the dude that exiled him the first time. IDK why that's important, but the screenwriter with Earth's easiest job determined that it was. Anyway, back at the coast, Tumak helps the Shell Tribe fend off a dinosaur attack by cleverly/accidentally causing it to impale itself on a large stake.

Harryhausen diligently animated the model with the stake still embedded rising and falling with the dinosaur's dying breaths, which is a level of perfectionism wholly out of proportion to the stature of the project, and that autismal refusal to phone it in is what made him the GOAT.

Sadly for Tumak, his popularity is short-lived, and he ends up getting exiled from the Shell Tribe too, prompting the audience to wonder whether he's the problem. Not Racquel, though, who chooses to accompany him back through the wasteland, during the course of which they stop off in a cave occupied by a family of sasquatches who beat one of their own to death and stick his head on a spike. This seems to get Racquel wet as fuck.

Really, babe? Sasquatch beheadings? I mean I'm not saying no.

Because it's a dinosaur flick, and for not a single reason more, they then witness a dinosaur fight:

As a kid I always liked the triceratops, and was mad as hell when it got merked in Fantasia and just lay in a field with a stomache ache in J*rassic P*rk. Well, here it is, tricerabros: /ourdino/'s turn to shine.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone famously articulated a rule of storytelling whereby plot beats should never be joined by "and then", rather, "therefore" or "but". In Harryhausenkinos, the line between "and then" and "but" is often gossamer-fine. Everything that happens might be rendered "and then a dinosaur emerges!" or "but then a dinosaur emerges!", with little causal infrastructure being laid. But Harryhausen could do what he liked. Does anyone complain when Rammstein just bust out a flamethrower in the middle of a set? Spectacle for the sake of spectacle is only rubbish when it fails to entertain. Audacity and raw talent separate the greats from the also-rans; one law for the lion and the ox is Oppression.

Anyway, Tumak and Racquel make it back to Rock turf, whereupon Racquel immediately gets into a sweaty, hairpulling catfight with Tumak's cave-ex (Martine Beswick, Thunderball) because she tried to take her favourite bone (not an euphemism).

Wow, that escalated quickly. I mean that really got out of hand fast.

The old geezer eagerly proffering a rock for Racquel to bash Martine's head in with made me bray like a fucking donkey.

Naturally, this brings the Rock Tribe together in a spirit of celebration, and Racquel is enthusiastically adopted and shows her new BFFs how to swim and/or bathe, which I think is supposed to be the kind of upgrade for them that those apes in 2001 received from the monolith. But then a pteranodon snatches up Racquel and takes her to its nest to feed its young. But then it gets mauled to death by a pterodactyl, causing Racquel to drop into the ocean. See what I mean about stretching the "but" (careful now)?

Knowing this was a real movie makes me feel much better about my shitty greenscreen skillz.

The pterodactyl then graphically eats the baby pteranodons. Holy shit, Harryhausen.

Is One Million Years BC high art? Yes, actually. For what deeper well of subject matter can be found than the eternal tug-of-war between the civilising impulse and the savage? Between the cold machines of techno-singularitarian utopianism and monsters from the id? Cave art predating any written script speaks more to us than any astroturfed Important Film or fart-huffing thinkpiece in the papers of note. Like Frazetta, Harryhausen mastered the technical wizardry of his medium to render archetypes from our profoundest dreams and nightmares. You will kneel to my elitist case for populism, and you'll like it.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Late Autumn!

The auteur theory, popularised by French New Wave critics-turned-makers-of-the-sort-of-films-a-critic-would-make, has been a disaster for the cinéma, not because their faves like Hitchcock and Ray weren't authors of a sort, but because after it became universal doctrine among the sort of person who makes video essays (bald), every hack filmmaker started self-consciously repeating motifs and turning his flicks into his own niche jerkoff material.

But long before the New Wave bores ruined everything, one filmmaker devised an authorial stamp so unique, and made such good use of it, that despite being acknowledged as the GOAT, he's almost never been ripped off. Video-essay Norwoods gush over such played-out hyperkinetic gimmicks as "the oner", but Yasujirō Ozu defied the crass culture of acceleration by increasingly eliminating camera movements from his ouevre as it matured from the silent era to the 60s, favouring tasteful minimalistic composition and a defiantly languid pace for his long succession of domestic dramas.

Strap the fuck in for some static noodle eating action like you've never seen.

"Boring!" you cry, throwing your rattle on the floor, kicking your stubby feet in your pram. Yeah, I thought so too, but Ozu is the rare filmmaker you grow into and not out of. His subject matter is the stuff of everyday life: generational friction, matchmaking, misunderstanding, loss, acceptance, shooting the shit about your college-age crushes, the fate of the old when left behind. His lengthy career captured changes in a society enamoured of tradition and the new in equal and irreconcilable measure. An Ozu film examines and observes, comments sparely and with room for ambiguity, and looks for the good in its conflicted characters. If you watch several back-to-back, you'll find they blur together in the memory, all variations on a theme, like eddies in a river always flowing down toward the sea.

Idea for a YouTube video: every Ozukino but it's just the establishing shots.

Late Autumn is my favourite one in part because it plays as a tribute to Ozu's frequent star and waifu, Setsuko Hara, once the young protagonist chafing against her elders' wishes, now the serene mother of another iteration of the same. Will she remarry? Will her daughter still find time to visit her when she moves out with her new man? You wouldn't care, you couldn't be compelled to care, but Ozu and his cast beguile you to care, because their neatly composed world is worth preserving. Many of his characters are Buddhist, many of the conflicts in his films about forgoing attachments and the transience of things: change is sad, but inevitable. But on the flipside, he very gently pushes back on that philosophy with the subtly radical rejoinder: it's inevitable, but sad.

Setsuko Hara > Mona Lisa

There is no order in which to watch the Ozu titles Late Autumn, Late Spring, etc.; it's just a naming convention he liked. None of his films are direct sequels to one another, but recurrences with difference, like the seasons themselves. Reject Hollywood; watch Ozu.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: A Man For All Seasons!

Sir Thomas More is not only cinéma's great reactionary hero, but one of history's too. A Man For All Seasons recounts with bottomless wit and pathos the escalation of his persecution by heretical, philandering fatass Henry VIII and his cadres of Maoist goons from the pointed nudge to threats, imprisonment, struggle session and show trial, to the final execution of the recalcitrant saint. Sir Thomas (Paul Scofield, who honed the role to perfection in many prior stage performances) seeks only to live up to the minimum standard Solzhenitsyn espoused: not to take arms against his era's iteration of the perennial petulant libtard revolt against truth, beauty, hierarchy and God, merely to opt out of it; not to say that which he does not believe. Let the lie come into the world, let it even reign there for a time, but not through me.

Who would win: the most painstakingly prudent man of his time, or everyone else being petty and retarded?

Sir Thomas remains a dignified enigma, one of the few grown-up protagonists to grace the screen, but the drama lays bare the small souls of his regime-compliant nemeses. Cromwell (Leo McKern), Henry's chief hatchetman, appeals to the consensus of the credentialed classes like the classic reddit midwit and/or Woman On Twitter (but I repeat myself):

Like UGH, like seriously? Like don't you see that all the celebrities you hate, the journalists who sneer at you, The Science, every corporation, and a bunch of soyjaks with "PhD" in their bios all agree that men are women, Russia blew up its own pipeline, covid was deadly to all gatherings except George Floyd protests, and Israel is our greatest ally? Like, do you even care about peer pressure at all?

Of course it's not too long before this crude veneer of sophistication gives way to blunt threats of torture on the rack. But most of us are neither More nor Cromwell, saint nor psychopath. Between the Good and the Bad scurry the Ugly. Perhaps you recognise yourself in this guy...

Or this guy...

Or this little asshole...

This oleaginous pissant is every resentful commie social climber you've ever met in your life. The most well-observed depiction of the true, abject face of evil in the movies.

All these people have their litanies of rationalisations. Of course, they all have to live under the considerable shadow of Fat King Fuckpants and his temper tantrums. Few scenes in movies demonstrate the hapless lot of sycophants trapped in the orbit of power like the one where Henry (Robert Shaw) jumps off his boat to find himself splattered in mud, turns and gives an I-meant-to-do-that laugh, taken up by his toadies, who all pile into the mud after him. It must be what it's like pretending Biden is the president.

Couldn't be me!

You know, as much as people shit-talk the boomers (and they're right to), at least the boomers actually sold out: they had goofy principles to begin with, but when they abandoned them, they at least got paid. My generation (millennials) abandoned all our principles for literally nothing. We all grew up laughing at Pain Olympics and the "Offended" page of Encyclopedia Dramatica, then at some point we all started pretending to be pious libtards, but we didn't even get anything for it. Man buries the millennial with this riposte:

You did it for worthless social credit.

Watch A Man For All Seasons, and repent.