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 disillusioned 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.

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

Theme: The Crusher - Dee Dee King

RIP Hulk Hogan. While it's true my interest in professional wrestling extends about as far as Miss Hancock's legs, that's pretty far (42.5", or an entire Warwick Davies). But I laud the Hulkster for an unrelated reason: he one-shotted evil gossip rag Gawker in court after they illegally posted his sex tape and refused to take it down. If I were Pope, I'd offer absolution of sins for anyone who puts a j**rnalist out of w*rk, but I'm not sure Hogan ever did anything wrong to begin with (no, saying a popular hip hop word while of the wrong caste isn't doing anything wrong; grow up). Since I know nothing about wrestling, let's celebrate his legacy with this 2008 kino instead.

This movie taught me not to do coke with a mid or you'll wake up in her firemen-themed shrine.

Mickey Rourke (Rumble Fish) stars as Randy "The Ram" Robinson, whose 80s heyday was as far behind him at the time of this movie as this movie is behind us now, but feels more ancient if not mythical, because not even I was alive for most of it. Still, Randy never traded in his ancient console for something as newfangled as a PS1 or Dream Cast, nor his Ratt and Cinderella records for Nevermind.

Uhhh based?

Sadly, Randy's career went off the rails and he's now stuck in a shit job with a snarky hairlet boss and working what looks like a dwindling indie circuit with much younger talent on the weekends, between drowning his sorrows at a strip club, showing off his pixelated likeness in an ancient vidya to half-bored kids, and trying awkwardly to reconcile with his amazingly obnoxious estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood, as herself).

Evan, honey, I'm not the one who failed to convince the world that Marilyn Manson was a creepy pervert.

But could Randy make a comeback with a twenty-year-anniversary rematch against his most famous heel, The Ayatollah (Ernest Miller)? While they almost certainly just made the heel The Ayatollah as a pointed stab at the low-status jingoism of the downscale plebs who watch wrestling, it actually works on a few levels: just like the news, the audience are marks, the shoot is a work, and the real enemy isn't Iran, but your own regime of which the entertainment industry is a consensus-fabricating appendage. You can even get into a more esoteric neo-Platonic reading of the kayfabe as the cave, but all that would go over Randy's head. As the ties that bind him to the outside world fray and snap under the pressure, he's both lost and set free. For him, it's the ""real"" world that's fake and gay, and he's not altogether wrong.

Scenes wahmen will never understand, thy name is this one from The Wrestler.

The ubiquitous Bush-era shakycam may have aged like ass (inb4 >implying it was ever good), but it fits better here than in a lot of other movies from the 2000s, and there's a running motif of tracking shots following Rourke around like a third-person vidya that gives it a bit of a visual signature. It's a rough, gnarly little gem that's sometimes hard to watch, but I return to it at times and it holds up. Had I ever had a heyday of my own, he'd be a literally me up there with Vincent Gallo and Tom Noonan in Manhunter. Watch The Wrestler.

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.

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.