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

Theme: Five Cellars Below - Blitzkid

SPOYLORZ

"Is there a leak in here, or are you just glad to see me?" - actual dialogue.

Before it was a popular West End musical, The Phantom of the Opera was a novel of no small Frenchness. In between, however, it was chiefly known as Lon Chaney's most celebrated silentkino, which is still the best version of it of all. Like your humble blôggueriste, our titular protagonist just wants to be loved by the qt3.14 opera singer and can't understand why she can't look past my hideous countenance and rat-infested subterranean lair to see the sensitive young elderly millennial within, Lacey.

This is my go-to opener at speed dating.

While most horror literally-mes are low-functioning specials like Jason Voorhees and Leatherface, our Erik is a genius composer, much like me with my poasts, not to say engineer, whose labyrinthine cellars are bedecked with deathtraps of proto-James Bond villain scope and vision, which brilliantly serve to trip up our bumbling would-be Captains Save-A-Hoe but, alas, are not quite equal to preventing the enormous lynch mob that rampages through his tunnels at the end.

Just once I'd like to be in the mob instead of chased by it.

For the original ending followed the book in having Christine make out with /ourboi/, thus rendering him fakecel and redeeming him in the moral calculus of, I guess, those "reylo" fat chicks(?), IDK. Fortunately test audiences said "fuck that" (verbatim) so we got a much more realistic and satisfying ending in which the uggo patrol savagely beats him to death and dumps his mangled carcass in the Seine.

Average 1925 test audience member (colourised).

Naturally the great joy of this centenarian kinematographeme lies in its grandiose sets and gothic imagery. Setpieces of note include the chandelier attack and masked ball, but Chaney's makeup effects have garnered even greater notoriety, to the point where even if you are a blind homeless man in Papua New Guinea you will have seen his iconic Phantom face at some point, totally ruining the scene in which Christine just has to take off his mask because she can't decide whether she's horrified or wet af for him until she sees, which is hilarious, but at the time the hitherto-unspoilered reveal was said to send shockwaves of fainting anxiety throughout the 1920s audience. Of course, the same was said of later horror movies such as Dracula, Frankenstein and The Exorcist, so take it with a grain of salt, but I like to imagine /ourboi/ scared the hoes fr fr.

Remember: a wide berth is the same as aura.

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

Theme: Black Bush - 16 Horsepower

The most entertaining film about the early Christians is Cecil B. DeMille's spectacular and batshit insane Sign of the Cross, which features an hilariously graphic battle to the death between women and dwarfs:

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But equally fascinating in an altogether different vein is 1953's The Robe. Marcellus Gallio (Richard Burton, Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds) HAS IT ALL: political connections, devoted gf Diana (Jean Simmons, who is not that juggalo with the big tongue), and a real shot at hot twins:

In ancient Rome you could just buy hot twins.

BUT THEN he overplays his hand and finds himself shipped off to Jerusalem, courtesy of the jealous machinations of flaming pervert Caligula, whom the script preposterously expects us to believe has the hots for Diana, and not some dude in chaps with a handlebar moustache.

Bro does the same flamboyant twirl twice in the same take before sitting down fr no cap.

When in Jerusalem, however, Gallio is obligated to preside over the crucifixion of three condemned men. One is of course our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, though at the time Gallio is given only a vague overview of Who He is supposed to be. The actor playing Jesus is seen only at a distance, or from angles that obscure his face, placing the viewer in the position of a rando catching a glimpse behind a crowd. Yet Gallio's Greek slave Demetrius (Victor Mature) manages to make eye contact with the Christ, compelling his immediate allegiance.

Yeah, I know this would have been a gr8 poast for Holy Week but I drop Halloween and Christmas articles at all times of the year too so just enjoy the wild ride as the wheels come off.

Only upon that fateful Friday, when the world turned dark, does Gallio begin to realise a fraction of the awesome cosmic import of his actions. As he gambles for the Christ's possessions with the soldiers, Gallio wins the titular garment, onto which he projects all the burden of his tormented conscience. The film takes on an uniquely haunting atmosphere as Gallio is beset by fever nightmares to which we suspect we are only partly party. It's the best attempt by any film to portray the presence of God, reflecting not the undepictable Itself, but the way most of us experience It: as a haunting, maddening voice urging us against our best efforts to shut It out.

While Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ emphasised the physical brutalisation meted out to God incarnate by His unworthy creations, The Robe best captures an infinitesimally small impression of the sheer ineffable alienness of God. Despite what terminal modernity patients might assert with laughable confidence, there's actually nothing unrelatable nor baffling at all about an Alien (1979) that doesn't care about you and just wants to eat and rape you; that's just a bear, a shark, or a fast-tracked asylum seeker. The essence of alienness is that which seems to us most paradoxical: that God Himself, impossible to dream of apprehending in His supercosmic magnificence, cares about our wretched souls.

They don't call it a Mystery for nothing.

The rest of the film deals with the aftermath in which Gallio attempts to track down the Robe to destroy it, and learns of the Resurrection from the Christians, FORCING him to CHOOSE where his allegiance lies. It's all compelling enough, but it's those scenes of holy horror that remain wedged in the memory, whispering to us of the judgement that awaits us all.

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:

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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 Beast!

Theme: We Never Learn - Clan of Xymox

Like Jawbreaker, The Beast is what I'd call a problematic fave if I spoke YouTuber With Pending Sexual Misconduct Allegations. This is because it cannot escape the Boomer Truth framework in which (or, very occasionally, against which) virtually all movies have been made. Fortunately, as you know, I have no hangups about liking what I like despite the soy-soaked motivations of its authors, because everything good is derived from a Platonic form of truth crudely translated by uncomprehending mortal vessels blind to its higher significance and resonances in the grand celestial design.

Goddammit, Pat, you are NOT steering this into another hidden depth. I MEAN it, I will turn this tank RIGHT ROUND.

So it is that an H*llywood m*vie doing everything it can to frame its critique of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan within safe regime-compliant terms wound up forecasting eerily the Yoo Ess Ay's own clusterfuck of an adventure in the Graveyard of Empires some decade-and-a-half later. For The Beast has its cast of commie marauders speak English in their own American accents, so if you happened to tune in while channel-hopping on TV (a primitive form of YouTube watched by early homo algorithmus), you might briefly think you'd stumbled on a 2000s movie about then-current events, except that the camera doesn't flail about as though the cameraman were being electrocuted, which for some reason everyone thought looked super cool in the 2000s.

"Uhh don't you think this would look better if we couldn't see what the fuck was going on?" - every director in the 2000s at once.

While most war movies suck and are boring (to say nothing of their propaganda content, which is on a par with newspapers), The Beast is audiovisual candy from its first frame to its last, and makes you wonder why they quit using those dreamy synth scores around the same time everyone traded in their Poison and Cinderella T-shirts for flannel. The detached, crystalline soundscapes and aerial tracking shots along Martianesque canyons render what you're seeing like a daydream, lighter than air, which is no small feat for a movie that opens with a Pashtun village massacre that culminates in a guy getting crushed to death feet-first by the titular tank.

They're doing this to me at work tomorrow.

I could prate on about the obvious parallels between bloated empires ruled by geriatrics overextending with Middle East wars but every day is Groundhog Day and you don't need to hear "I Got You Babe" again from me. The parallel less often drawn is how all libtard empires justify their wars of aggression with appeals to that perennial idol, pRoGrEsS. The Soviet tank crew's Afghan comrade justifies selling out his people on the basis that the Sovs will modernise his backwards homeland, citing laughably outmoded theory of the promised future "dialectical materialism", which is hardly less laughable than the neocon slime bewailing the loss of the Gendyr Stydies Dypartments at the sham universities they propped up during their later occupation of the same unhappy country.

Soviet/neocon outreach to the Afghans (1982-2022, colourised).

Growing up is realising there's not only zero daylight between commies and libtards, but as little between said libtards and neocons. It's all one big slurry of murderous, bottomlessly stupid garbage, every word of it premised on Boomer Truth.

So while this cringe would-be mic-drop seems merely trite if you put any stock in the writers/directors/miscellaneous rapists as the authors of the work, it's actually deeply revealing and thematically on point: the only language the smartest pinko in the crew can grasp onto to gesture vaguely at the truth is LE BAD NATZEES, just as he can appeal only to the women who attempt to stone him with one of three words in their language he's learned the whole time he's been in their country.

Hezbollah bros brief me on the finer points of their Lebanon defence strategy (2026, colourised).

The tank commander tells a story of the battle of Stalingrad in which he was pressed into use as a child soldier using Molotov cocktails to disable German tanks. Sooner than realise his own loathsome regime (who were the majority stakeholder in the invasion of Poland and had already murdered millions in peacetime) was the problem, he and all his fuckup crew can only project onto their archetypal shadow enemy. In Boomer Truth tHe NaZiS are simultaneously unique in their cartoonish evilness, but also every undesirable act by anyone today means they're tHe NaZiS, because tHe NaZiS are the collective boogeyman for generations of arrested children.

This tired maymay is unintentionally brilliant because it perfectly demonstrates the maximum level of introspection permissible under the Boomer Truth Regime: are the objects of the daily Two Minutes' Hate, in fact, The Bad Guys? Why yes, comrade! Back to work, no further questions.

It's worth mentioning that this film was shot in isr**l, an actual supremacist ethnostate with a history of nothing but ethnic cleansing and genocide for lebensraum, whose self-described master race lobby their Epstein colony's congress night and day with definitions of aNtIsEmItIsM that make it a specific thoughtcrime to compare them to the hated natzee shadow archetype, thus making it impossible for the Newspeak speaker even to articulate the thought that anything they do is bad, because badness = natzism and natzism badness.

But since, for now, we have the words to do so, let's reflect once more that murdering the German civilisation in World War Heckin Two did nothing to remove ethnosupremacism from the world, only to clear the way for a far more powerful, dangerous and evil ethnosupremacist clique to seize global control unopposed. For this reason, there can no longer be any defence of the boomoid myth; you must confront it, and repent.

Next week: Dude Where's My Car!!!11