Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Legend of the Surami Fortress!

Theme: Stein um Stein - Rammstein

Let me tell you a tale...

Everyone knows Sergei Paradjanov for his seminal 60s classic Sayat Nova (aka The Colour of Pomegranates), an ostensible biopic of Armenia's most celebrated poet. It was obvious to everyone that Paradjanov had the most singular talent and vision among filmmakists since Ozu, but the Soviet regime did not approve of his flagrant flouting of socialist realism formula and penchant for stirring up nationalist sentiment in the benighted SSRs, so he spent four years in a prison camp on what nearly everyone agrees were bogus charges of rayping a Party functionary before being released, only to reprise his controversy-courting schtick in the mid-80s because, in his words, "lmfao yolo nigga idgaf".

Paradjanov surveying all the territories occupied by his balls (1985, colourised).

While this absolute madladdery merits celebration in itself, the fact that Legend of the Surami Fortress adapts so effortlessly Paradjanov's patented succession of album-cover-worthy compositions and bizarre vignettes to a more traditionally narrative folkloric template makes one wonder why no indie hipster fast-tracked by H*llywood has tried to make a franchise flick this way, until one remembers that indie hipsters don't actually watch arthouse films or have integrity, audacity or character. Yes, Legend, set in a bizarrely stylised medieval Georgia, has a plot, albeit one the great filmmakists often seem indifferent to conveying with any great clarity or urgency, in favour of complete non-sequiturs like this:

????

The plot concerns a fortress which repeatedly collapses, to the great consternation of the Czar, and the intertwining fates of various slaves, merchants, warriors and clairvoyants that culminate in a solution: a young man must sacrifice his life to be entombed within the foundation of the building, ensuring its stability for the ages. This might seem like an odd idea, but similar legends are found as far off as Japan, so many cultures shared it. I myself have immured several victims in my foetid crawlspace, but less to consecrate the building and more because they wouldn't stop wearing her face.

Neighbours know better than to bother me or ask too many questions. You heard nothing; you smelled nothing.

But Legend's impact lies in its striking visual style over the vicissitudes of plot anyway. Closeups are few, lending the objectivity of detachment that makes the stagey imagery stand out in its naked strangeness. Compare Kurosawa's Dreams and Terayama's Pastoral: To Die in the Country for examples of similar atmospheric derealisation. Off-symmetrical framing is another motif, introducing subtle dissonance into an ordered world:

I'm showing these compositions to Stanley Kubrick to watch his eye twitch later this evening, but you're not invited.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Phantom Carriage!

Theme: Dark are the Veils of Death - Candlemass

Christmas has The Mothman Prophecies and Curse of the Cat People. Halloween has the Night of the Demons remake. New Year's Eve has but one kinograph of note, but it's arguably (and not even very arguably) the best silentkino and best Christian film of all time, and unlike most of my Greatest Movies of All Time of the Week, it might actually be the greatest movie of all time.

Big talk from a big bastard, you say? Well let me tell you a tale...

Victor Sjöström directs and stars as David Holm, an abusive, neglectful husband and mean drunk who delights in spurning offers of help from the local Salvation Army sisters and corrupting his peers with his nihilistic bullshit. In one scene, he tells a fellow consumptive (this was a disease in black-and-white times) that he coughs in people's faces to drag a few of them with him on the way out.

I mean this guy was a real jerk.

Silent cinéma is often ridiculed for its stylised performances, but Sjöström's showcase is uniquely compelling, probably because there's no vanity in it: his Holm is alternately loathsome, dastardly, pitiable, wretched, menacing, perversely charming and consumed with maddening sorrow. Windbag critics have made calling films "powerful" a punchline, but The Phantom Carriage merits the superlative and more. Anyway, Holm's degenerate existence is about to be rudely interrupted, for Death has come to him on New Year's Eve.

The ghostly transparency was cutting-edge at the time. 2bh, for what it is, it holds up better than most CGI from circa ever to now.

But while Sjöström's lesser pupil Bergman's later iteration of the Grim Reaper was more-or-less a hammy villain, Carriage's more unsettling vision has a mortal man enslaved to drive the titular cart to and fro nonstop for an interminable, enervating year collecting the souls of the departed until the next New Year's Eve comes round and his last client must become his successor - and it looks as though our miscreant protagonist is next up on the list.

Me working nights, or mornings, or on my day off.

WILL Holm be damned to drive the ghostly carriage? CAN he right the wrongs he's done in life before they take the lives of his beleaguered family? OR will it be the first one again, because I didn't have a third thing? I'm not telling, but the gut-punch denouement will have you searching your own compromised, endangered soul. Skip the forced party, hangover and chlamydia tests; watch The Phantom Carriage before the year is out.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Godfather Part 2!

Theme: The Godfather (Theme) - Fantômas

Contains SPOILARS.

There exist two schools of thought: one, that The Godfather Part 2 is by far the best one in the series, and two, the wrong one. The real controversy is whether the original release, which segues between 1950s sequel and 1900s-20s prequel scenes, or one of the multiple edits that place the scenes in chronological order (some of which include the third film), plays best. My answer may SHOCK you: I don't care, but Part 2 works perfectly well without the flashback scenes, which you can easily skip with your DVD remote as you suck Werther's Originals and rock back and forth gently in your rocking chair. Fuck, I'm old.

"See CHUDS? Without immigration you wouldn't have had heckin wholesome murderous crime lords like Don Vito in America. Checkmate, natzees!" - Francis Ford Coppola, verbatim.

Never has a protagonist been so relatable as Al Pacino's Michael who means to get around to divesting his legitimate business interests from organised crime one of these decades, sort of like you mean to go on that diet or I mean to stop pissing everyone off with my 100% correct politics takes. Yet, just when he means to pull the plug, eventually, maybe, events contrive to drag him back into the cycle of intrigue and murder, and by "events", I mean his dipshit brother Fredo and GOAT villain of the cinéma Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg).

This is the scene everyone remembers but in no small part because he's so composed and charming in his other scenes.

It's a classic archetypal deal with the devil, only Coppola couches his accidental honesty in the plausible deniability that it's all a critique of CaPiTaLiSm and CoLoNiAlIsM, which reminds me of the way /leftypol/ made their own safe-edgy happy merchant who was some pig guy in a top hat. When was the last time The Man ever wore hats that big?

Reeeally makes you think.

Much more compelling than how young Vito became old Vito is the tragedy of Frankie Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo), the best and most sympathetic of all the rogues' gallery on display, whose erstwhile loyalty and faith in the Famiglia are only dashed when Roth's goons stage a botched hit on him, framing Michael, in a well-worn gambit known as the "Lavon Affair". Godfather stans like to compare the films to Shakespeare tragedies, and Frankie reminds me of both Cordelia and Kent in King Lear: had Michael listened to Frankie's street-smart counsel in the beginning, much might have been averted and little to nothing lost: the Cuba deal is ruined anyway owing to Castro's bullshit.

Something something Blumpf, something something Eff Bee Eye.

Is it really Michael's desire to root out the traitor in his own ranks that persuades him to string things out with Roth, or is he still halfway tempted by his greed for profit and legitimacy? How about daddy's posthumous approval?

When you dance with the devil, the devil always leads.

When Frankie belatedly realises that it wasn't Michael who betrayed him, and that he's flipped for nothing, he accepts his fate with stoical dignity. RIP Frankie; you were the unsung MVP of Godfather films.

We actually wuz.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Kwaidan!

Theme: Transcendence - Crimson Glory

The most lavish and impressive horror production of all time actually shares something in common with video nasty Unhinged: both films are at times so languorously paced that you practically start to nod off before something jarringly frightening happens to shock you back into wakefulness. There, though, the similarity ends, because Kwaidan is more like Kurosawa's Dreams, and not just because both are Japanese anthologies, but also because they approach the Platonic form of cinéma. Entirely filmed within a huge warehouse set made up to look like all manner of locations interior and exterior, Kwaidan's constructed dream-world is as stylised and incongruous as it is hypnotically convincing. But then again, a third comparison suggests itself: like South of Heaven, Kwaidan uses obvious backdrops throughout, producing the same superreal dissonance as the painted shadows on the sets of Caligari.

No movie lends itself so hard to making those cinegrids they post on /tv/ sometimes.

Kwaidan is set variously in periods of Japanese history I couldn't possibly name or profess any knowledge of at all, and seems to be based on traditional folklore of that most obsessed-over country. Some instalments are quite straightforward morality plays in which a protagonist's pride or folly leads him to some paranormal ruin, while others are more whimsical, even comical ghost tales with cryptic or file-not-found meanings, but the three-hour whole runs entirely on atmosphere. Its ghostly apparitions probably seem spookier to western audiences with no frame of reference for why they take the forms they do or what the fuck is going on half the time, but why look a gift horse in the mouth? Moreover, Kwaidan features the best battle sequence of all time of the week, and probably the best naval battle ever filmed:

You guys, I think I'm a weeaboo now.

I think it's fair to say that Kwaidan is every bit as objectively the best horrorkino as The Road Warrior is the best actionkino or Apocalypse Now the best warkino*. You could compile a more-or-less objective top ten (or so) just by taking those GOATs from each genre, and it would be both more interesting to read and far more fun to watch than all those lists with Citizen Kane at the top you always see. But then, your list should be your list, which is to say it should be my list, because you have all the discerning taste of a village idiot. Watch Kwaidan.

*The theatrical cut, of course; French plantation scene apologists go back to r/criterion and kys.

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

Theme: Hotel California - The Eagles

Which clues did you overlook?

Stanley Kubrick's kinos are the most talked-about in the history of the medium, in large part because, like his mutual influence David Lynch (Kubrick screened Eraserhead for the Shining cast to put them in the right mood), he was a cryptic son of a bitch. The Shining might even edge out his own Eyes Wide Shut for the most theorised-upon of films, with each viewer convinced it has some deeper meaning than the surface-level narrative suggests. Is it about the gold standard? Generational abuse? Occult themes? This is hilarious because it makes Stephen King seethe; he wanted everyone to appreciate his deep takes on alcoholism (bad) and white peephole (worse).

"And then the spooky ghost said...THE HECKIN EN WOOORD NOOO HELP ME NІGGERMAN I'M GOING INSAAAANE AAAAAGH" - Stephen King, The Shining, page 1.

Personally, I suspect Kubrick's real deeper meaning was specifically to mock King: I'm reliably informed the wrecked car in this scene is the make and model driven by Jack in the novel, in a cheeky visual metaphor for Kubrick smashing King's sophomoric vision beneath his own weightier take:

Yeah, I'm not going to look it up. I'm pretty sure Rob Ager confirmed it, but he has four hundred and twenty billion videos about The Shining so if you want to find which one, happy hunting.

Not content to limit his trolling to King alone, Kubrick further ridiculed the characters and plot with subliminal details like having Wendy dress like Goofy, and the cast by demanding ludicrous numbers of identical takes for random line readings. But whatever hidden meanings may have been intended, it's the hypnotic mood of the picture that makes it one of the most rewatchable of kinographs. To be honest, I never found it scary at all, but really funny, but I don't think that's a problem or even altogether unintentional. Nicholson's famous "here's Johnny" line was an ad-lib that Kubrick kept in despite his reputation for autismal micromanagement, most likely because it's a great laugh line and Kubrick found the material funny and the fact most of the audience were baffled by it funnier. He also hated furfags ahead of the curve:

"Yiff in hell subhumans" - Kubrick in the editing room, doing the Kubrick stare.

But if we're to put on our serious hats, the most persuasive theory about The Shining to me is the pedo one: Jack reads a Playgirl magazine with an article about incest, which has been widely interpreted to mean he's fucking little Danny, and quotes Lolita (the novel about a guy trying to justify fucking a 12-y/o girl, which Kubrick adapted in the 60s) when attempting to talk down Wendy from trying to fend him off with a baseball bat. This is by no means incompatible with my fuck-Stephen-King interpretation, because King later wrote a child orgy in It, so it's entirely possible Kubrick was calling King (the author with the drinking problem) a nonce via his literally-him stand-in Jack.

Pedos in the glamorous world of entertainment? Well now I've heard everything.

Just for fun though, here's a wildly different theory that makes you go hmm in an altogether contradictory direction. Perhaps the fact the same movie can be spun off into what seem like endless variations of interpretation is what makes it so perennially fascinating. You'll be watching it forever...and ever...and ever.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Tabu!

Theme: Leah - Roy Orbison

Hipster objections aside*, Robert J. Flaherty invented the documentary with his Eskimokino Nanook of the North and F.W. Murnau cut such all-time classics as Faust (but is better known for accidentally ruining vampires with the death-by-sunlight gag, which later halfwits would play literally, in the biggest nerf ever suffered by a stock monster). It may come as no surprise then that when these two titans of silent cinéma teamed up, they unleashed a kino for the ages. Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, set on Bora Bora, is the best movie of all time you'll see this week, and concerns the doom incurred by two young lovers who breach a Tabu (1931)!!!

>tfw no etc. etc.

Reri (Anne Chevalier) is the young maiden selected to replace a late vestal virgin on a neighbouring island. I'm not sure if this was a real tradition but the Society Islands did have an elite caste of Arioi, who were permitted sex but not children; any that were born to them were ritually killed. Anyway, this de facto abduction-in-tribute of a daughter of Bora Bora is framed as a great honour by the foreign emissary, which I find hilarious. But Reri's bf (Matahi) is heartbroken and defies the Tabu (1931) to run off with her, prompting sinister old fart Hitu to hunt them down as they seek refuge among sailors on another island, where this dude does the best dance of all time of the week:

>ywn bust these sick moves why live?

WILL our young lovers outrun their destiny? CAN Hitu recapture Reri? IS the Tabu (1931) a lazy metaphor for Murnau being a bumboy? Fortunately, NO to the last one: whatever the great filmmaker's extremely dubiously alleged proclivities, he had the Tolkienian taste to avoid clumsy allegorising in favour of a nonspecific but endlessly applicable and thus timeless idea. Tabu doesn't even stipulate whether the Tabu is meant to be a good thing or a bad thing. It's the one-in-a-zillion film that's actually content to let the viewer ponder it over for himself. Perhaps Murnau shed his didacticism as he did his intertitles: all the text in Tabu is artfully framed as actual writing in-story.

There's no intertitle for what this kid yells so you're free to assume it's the funniest slur.

Also, Murnau was said to be exceptionally tall, with heights from 6'4" to 6'11" variously cited, so even if he did rail dudes that's basically like a normal guy railing bitches, but in this house, Murnau was a STRAIGHT king.

The wet dresses, topless chicks and Baywatch bounce per reel of footage tells a distinctly hetero story, and for 1931? Forgetaboutit.

Flaherty only directed the opening sequence and seems to have become quite disenchanted with the project and ceded it mostly to Murnau, but it was his familiarity with the locale and love of the world cultures first ignored and then homogenised away by the steamroller of libshit modernity that fired the project and made it viable to begin with. None of these cultures can exist on their own terms anymore, as every manifestation of them is now filtered through self-consciousness and anticolonialist self-righteousness, like when those Māori assclowns do the goofy haka dance in the New Zealand parliament while wearing suits**. Only le problematic shitlords like Flaherty or Mel Gibson can pay authentic tribute to the great and terrible cultures of the world that was.

"Check these dubs" - Bora Bora anon.

*Waah, waah, he broke the rules of documentary filmmaking that were made up after the term was first coined to describe one of his own films! Shut up, bitch!

**The Māori eagerly adopted European technology from the off, specifically muskets, which they immediately used to murder one another en masse, most egregiously the pacifistic Moriori of the Chatham Islands. You'd think this would make them by far the least sympathetic anticolonialist hypocrites, but the same sort of thing happened throughout North America too, so they're more or less average in that ignoble regard.