Birth of a nation (1915)

What do you say about a film that attempts to say that Ku Klux Klan saved America from degeneration and chaos, along with pseudo-democracy in the hands of primitive blacks and evil mulattos? Birth of a nation is the most racist movie I've seen, ever. Its whole structure builds upon a racist agenda: depicting whites as the saviors of civilization and blacks as the threat to enlightened culture. The racism of the film is bafflingly consistent (in its own terms) and Griffith creates an entire ideology of race. This is undisguised racism that is not mollified or softened in any way.

The only decent black people in the film are those who stand up for their former slave owners, the "faithful souls". The most evil creatures on earth are mulattos, who emulate the intelligence of whites, but who are nonetheless ruled by dark instincts and violent sexuality. Mulattos, we are told, are sneaky, and their innermost desire is to deride the virtue of whites and to violate white women's virginal sexuality. The civil war tore America out of the old ways, and only Ku Klux Klan restored order and stability, in which each race goes back to its given roles.

This film is bad in plenty of way. It is melodramatic and almost all scenes are totally outrageous. A black man assaults a white girl! (Or that is what we are supposed to think) A mulatto, sister/wife of a black politician, suddenly bursts into ecstatic dance! The idyllic family life of pre-war South! Ku Klux Klan members form a holy army to fight for their Nation! The north and the south are reconciled when northerners are called back to reason by their gut reactions (we can't marry off our daughters to black men) and stop being foolish "rebels", "carpetbaggers"! And so on, and so on.

But The birth of a nation is still an interesting film to watch. It developed filmmaking in lots of ways and technically it is a very enjoyable film. Its use of color tinting is quite radical and works very well as a technique to embellish some parts of the story as well as to create variety in atmosphere. Its use of editing (intercuts) & cinematography is also very interesting. The pictures often have an eerie rhytm adapted to the significance of a segment within the overall story.

The temptation when watching a film like this one, a demonstration of blunt racism, is to think that Griffith was merely uneducated, a man trapped in his own times. Now, we are tempted to think, we know better than to be racist.
Here, you might say two things: Griffith made a square-edged film that is less sneaky than many other films that display a more secret racist agenda. To most viewers today, Griffith's movie is obviously racist. But the risk is that it is taken too lightly, that it is dismissed as obviously stupid. Well: think about things like revenge and what it is to say that a country has reached a state of harmony. This is not things that belong to an uneducated past. These structures of thinking are present in contemporary political debate and disentangling these structures is not always easy.

Sügisball (2007)

Sügisball (Autumn ball) might be the only Estonian movie I have seen in my life. There are certainly some things that speak for this movie. The first thing is that a large part of the soundtrack consists of songs by one of my favorite bands, German doom-jazzers Bohren & der club of gore. I didn't know this when I sat down to watch it. The other major accomplishment of Sügisball is the use of urban wasteland. There are hazy images of nocturnal big city streets, and the settings consisting of endless rows of drab apartment blocks create a dramatic backdrop for what goes on in the movie.
The third strength is that it has one really funny joke. I won't spoil it for you. 
A single mother and her little girl who is addressed by men in gray overcoats / an architect who has doubts about his life / a drunken author who has doubts about his life / a doorman who finds his job demeaning. 
A big flaw of Öunpuu's movie is that it clings to a cliché that is employed in too many films that strive to be contender for the Arthouse movie of the year. "The characters long for close relationships but nobody understands them." Boo-hoo. The problem is not that this is too bleak or too depressing - the problem is that we've seen this before, many times, and even then, it was too one-dimensional, too stereotypical, too faux-existentialist. I mean, how many TIMES can you show a drunken man throwing some wine glasses on the floor because he is so FRUSTRATED with life and so filled with destructive ENERGY?
Why are these people so unhappy? We don't know.
Öunpuu sometimes manages to arrange a nice scene of an urban landscape or bright street lights - but in this movie, he is not a great interpreter of human relationships. And then I DON'T say that every movie should be about relationships. But Sügisball tries hard to be the kind of movie that provides stark images of alienation, fear, hopelessness. Etc.
And Please, directors, hear me out: SPARE ME from on-screen philosophizing about profound questions concerning the meaning of life and human happiness. Make a movie instead.

My own private Idaho (1991)

Keanu Reeves is expressive like a log. That is only too evident when watching any of his movies, including Gus van Sant's exploration of the life of boy prostitutes, My own private Idaho. Teen idol River Phoenix is slightly better, but not much. Luckily, this film is not about believable on-sceen appearances of the actors. The acting creates an effect of alienation (of course, Udo Kier has to act perform a little song in heavy German accent!), and so does the dialogue, partly performed in Shakespearian English (segments of the dialogue are from Henry IV). Sometimes these verfremdungseffekts work, and sometimes they don't. It's an uneven film, heavily marked by its time. (Why do I say this? Will I say it in twenty years?) But most of the small little experiments contribute to what becomes an offbeat, quite beautiful meditation on drifters. And yes - the "drifter" is romantizised to a sometimes ridiculous extent ("The road will never end", duh). It's always like that. But the interesting thing is that van Sant brings some unusual themes into the movies. The bromance, here, is explicitly homoerotic.
As a mood film, this is not bad. As a story about unrequited (?) love, it works too.
Clearly, this is a very influential movie. One sees traces of it in lots of contemporary indie movies.

A special day (1977)

My recollection of A special day, a film by Ettore Scola about the encounter of a housewife and a homosexual radio announcer, is that it is an almost flawless film. Watching it for the second time, I realize it isn't. There are lots of things to praise. The use of sound in the film is one of the things that make this an exciting film. The setting of the story is the day during which Hitler and other leading men of the Nazi party join hands with their Italian ally in a big parade in Rome. The story takes place in a Roman apartment building. Antonietta, a bored housewife, begins the big day by making sure the rest of the family make it to the parade on time. She remains at home. Somewhere in the house, there is a radio. It is the blaring, squaky radio we here on the soundtrack; reporters talk about the events, patriotic songs are played. These low-quality radio sounds accompany the story of the film and constitute an important layer of its atmosphere. There is no additional soundtrack.
What I didn't remember about A special day (or what I didn't notice the first time around) is that the dialogue is sometimes too psychologically explicit. We learn stuff about the characters that should have been shown more subtly, rather than blurted out in talky dialogue.
But for the most part, this is an awesome film about what it is like to be seen as a useless human being in a society preoccupied with strength and manliness. It's a film about loneliness and sudden bursts of emotion.

Criss cross (1949)

It's Sunday and I watch a movie that is completely nonsensical but not boring to the extent that I wouldn't finish it. I've never heard of Robert Siodmack. Apparently, he's the one to blame for the run-of-the-mill thriller Criss Cross. There are two good things about this movie. There is a scene during the first half of the movie that takes place in a bar. A jazz band is jamming. They are playing really good, driven stuff. Our hero is standing away from the dancing crowd. He looks at the girl he was once married to. She sits alone at a table. That's a great scene. The other good thing is the end. Usually, a cynical movie paves way for an ending that softens some of the hard edges of the film. This one doesn't. And, wait a minute, Burt Lancaster is not bad.

The firemen's ball (1967)

It's hard not to interpret the The firemen's ball as a subversive movie. Even though this movie is about the fire department of some small town in which the 86:th birthday of one retired fire chief is celebrated with a big ball, it is easy to pick up political themes. Most of all, it's a fun film about shabby facades, greed and the impossibility of seeing things for what they really are. Actually, this is a wonderfully funny film. Milos Foreman does a great job in presenting these old-timers who have worked in the fire department all their lives and now they want to honor their colleague, whatever it takes. There is to be a lottery, a beauty contest, and the beauty queen is to hand over the present (which is, of course, a hatchet). Everything goes to hell, but the most important task for the old-timers is to make it seem like everything is in order. The segment of the film in which a jury comprising elderly gentlemen do their best to compile a beauty contest line-up is a comic gem.

Flickan (2009)

If you are interested in Swedish cinema beyond Stieg Larsson adaptations, Beck and god damn Kurt Wallander, Turku is not the best place in the world for being up to date with recent releases. That's why I was lucky to find Flickan at the local alternative DVD rental shop (the only one that is not part of a big chain). Most reviewers praised the cinematography of this movie. That's understandable. It is very, very pretty, but also, perhaps, a tad bit conventional (zooming in a flower against a blurry backdrop to create a dramatic, melancholy effect). Overall, it's a strong film. It revolves around a nine year old girl, whose parents have travelled to Africa. Her aunt comes to look after her, but the girl gets tired of her partying and carelessness and finds a way to get rid of her. For the rest of the film, we see the girl alone, with her older, sex-obsessed friends and with a boy her own age. Fredrik Edfeldt is successful in his attempt to describe a kid's world. There are many scenes that are a bit hard to watch because they rub our faces into the embarrassing, physical or the cruel. I don't mean to say this is a film that exploits those feelings, rather, there is stuff here that rings true in a way that is hard to fend off. In several scenes, the girl meets her older friend's father. The man always tells her to sing and dance for him. She is embarrassed and humiliated but does it anyway. When she meets him in a mall, she automatically starts performing her little number. The man cruelly interrupts her, telling her people might find her nuts.
No, Edfeldt does not create an idealized picture of childhood. He presents children as beings no less complex than adults are. This is a real strenght.

Ten (2002)

Ten is not Abbas Kiarostami's best film. But it sure is a good film that plays with the form of documentary to create a sudued piece of fiction. The film is divided into - surprise! - ten sequences. In each one of them, we follow the same female driver along with the passenger she happens to have in her car; sometimes it's a woman she has given a lift, and sometimes it's her little Emperor-ish son. If you have any preconceptions about Iranian life, some of them will be shattered by this movie. The women portrayed in the movie do not comprise one homogenous group. Rather, they embody different attitudes towards society, men, what it is like to be a woman. The opening scene is perfectly chosen. The driver has a verbal fight with her son. He accuses her of everything, and she defends herself by critiquing her former husband, and society. The camera rarely (never?) moves from the boy's agitated body language. It's an emotionally poignant seene that creates a kind of suffocating effect, in a good way.
As a viewer, I feel trapped in the car along with these people. The minimalist idea of the film is well executed. I barely think about not seeing anything in the entire movie except the front seat of a car. The makes us strangely aware of the connection between what we hear and what we see. In many scenes, we only see one of the interlocutors, and we can only imagine what the other looks like when she talks. Of course, you might give this a political interpretation.

Rocco and his brothers (1960)

At 00:00 I thought: I guess Visconti made a few good movies, let's try this. At 01:30 I was totally fed up. Mostly with roguish men. A bunch of brothers who move from the South to the northern City / moral hardening / a screeching, pudgy matron with an quasi-Oedipal relationship to all her sons / a girl who chooses first one of the brothers for her lover, then another one. I see nothing interesting about this film. Not the story, not its style. I turned the thing off and went to bed, leaving the hord of brothers behind, trapped on that scrappy VHS tape. If you consider watching this movie, have a look at the plot keywords at IMDB: "prostitute", "widow", "boxer", "murder". In this case, it's an apt description of what this movie is about.

The death of mister Lazarescu (2005)

I've been looking forward to watching The death of mister Lazarescu (2005) for a long time. Now that I've seen it, I am satisfied to say that it lived up to all my expectations. Even though the story is depressing as hell the film represents a raw kind of dark comedy. The film takes off with images of mister Lazarescu, an elderly, lonely man who lives with his cats. He downs some drinks and calls the ambulance to tell them he is sick and needs to get to the hospital. He receives some help from his neighbors (who reproach him for letting his cats pee in the stairwell) and then, finally, an ambulance arrives. But the events that follow bring little hope for mister Lazarescu. He is shuttled from hospital to hospital, rejected on various grounds, there is no place for him, he fails to conform to the doctor's legalistic definition of what it means to go into surgery "voluntarily". This is a brutal film about bureaucracy, depersonalization and institutionalization. For most characters in the film - not all - Lazarescu is just another drunk the treatment of whom society cannot afford. When the ambulance personnel bring him to yet another hospital, he is met with the standard question: "You have been drinking?" And, later on: "This man has peed his pants?" What makes this film so great is that it is sober (no pun intended). It's a film about society and work. But this is not a lecture in sociology. Puiu's characters are not built like representatives of their societal role & function (that might be justified in some films, I'd say, but Puiu's film takes another path).
Puiu has made a film that is good in several ways. Even though there are not many obvious experiments to be found here in terms of cinematography etc., the style of sometimes wobbly hand-held camera fits its style. Puiu follows mister Lazarescu's journey in and out of consciousness, dismissals, how he is sometimes tended to, how night turns into morning, with an admirable palette of perspectives and atmospheres. There is no big statement about humanity being either this way or that way. It's a film where cynicism is described as cynicism and, even more interestingly, where those doctors and nurses who are not cynical are NOT depicted as heroic, quasi-celestial beings. It's a down-to-earth film that is evident both in its treatment of cruelty and goodness. This might be a quite rare thing, actually - because goodness tends to be transformed into either naivety or some inexplicable spurt of altruistic action.

The ending of the movie, which I won't spoil, is a moment of sheer brilliance. As is the rest of the film.