Män kan inte våldtas (1978)

Jörn Donner's adaptation of Märta Tikkanen's feminist classic Män kan inte våldtas might not be a masterpiece, but it is all right. My biggest disappointment with it is its focus. Yes, there are some important feminist points here (which I remember from the book) that Donner's film has not left out, but except those few moments, this is less a political tract than a thriller. It's about Eva, a librarian, who goes out to celebrate with her colleague. At the restaurant, they meet a man. The man invites her to his apartment. He rapes her. The rest of the film is about the revenge she plans to take on his action. What is so disappointing about the film is that the essential question of the book, "can men be raped?" gets very little space in Donner's take on the story. Instead, we see Eva stalking the man who raped her. She puts on a wig and tries to obtain details about his life.
Some of these scenes are successful in conveying what Eva goes through. There is one scene in particular that I liked. She has visited an ex, a lawyer, and stolen his gun. Eva goes to a garbage heap to practice with the gun. We see Eva's face and birds restlessly circling over the garbage heap. The quietness of the early morning is disturbed by the sharp sounds of the shooting. A garbage truck arrives at the place and in a long shot we see an endless string of garbage being poured out over the heap. It's a beautiful scene.
As I said, this is not a completely uninteresting film. I could help but notice that some parts of the dialogue seem pretty archaic ("do women have to become men in order to create a career for themselves?"), while others are highly relevant today (certain images of male and female sexuality that are still used as arguments in debates about rape). 
One peculiar aspect of this, and other Donner films, is that both Finnish-Swedish and Swedish actors are used.

Precious (2009)

Precious was, in a way, a strange mix of film styles. Some scenes were brutal and dark, others veered towards the comic and the absurd, while others again appealed to "human drama" (the kind that is supposed to be invigorating for the soul) and stories that have "human interest". That a film contains changes in atmosphere and style need not be a problem, but in this case it was. Precious was a slightly confusing experience, as the different styles did not seem to be intentionally disparate: this lack of coherent style did not shed light on anything, nor did the different "parts" communicate among themselves. This is not to say that Precious was a bad film. It just wasn't a very thought-out one (or if it was, its play with style was too subtle for this viewer). I can add that some tricks were familiar. It's not unusual to see a character dealing with a tough situation and it is so tough for her that she escapes into a dream world of her own. This is conventional stuff. The issues I had with Precious is that I had a hard time swallowing both the dark parts and the more upbeat stuff. I had a feeling somewhere in the back of my head that I might be tricked and that I'd better watch out.
Precious tells the story about a black teenager who is sexually abused at home and when she gets pregnant for the second time, she is suspended from school. She joins an alternative schooling program. It's a bleak story.
The scenes I liked best were sort of in between: these were scenes in which Precious (the girl) interacted with people who were not monsters but more complex beings, such as a social worker (played by Mariah Carey, whom I did not recognize).
I have a hard time expressing what I found problematic. Maybe Precious tries to hard to be "authentic" and maybe it paints with too broad streaks when introducing more positive elements into Precious' life. And while the closing credits have faded out, I try not to think about Oprah. But I do. The fact that quite a few critics call this film "inspiring" and that it "engages our empathy" might reveal something of my predicament here.

The straight story (1999)

I want to put on 501's/suspenders/my best flannel shirt & move to Iowa or Wisconsin to become a tractor driver.
This desire is not lessened when watching David Lynch's offbeat drama about redemption, The Straight story. It's said to be the Lynch film that is not really a Lynch film. I don't agree with this. He works with themes that other films take up as well, but tend to remain in the background.
The story: a 73-year old man, Alvin, suddenly learns that his brother Lyle has suffered a stroke. He hasn't talked to his brother for a long time (one thing that shows this is a good film is that the circumstances are not clear). They live in different states. He can't drive a car because his eyes are too bad. He wants to go there himself. So, he pimps up his lawnmower, which is transformed into a vehicle of transformation. Not a fast one, though, and it is in this faux-slow motion that we see the main characters of the film: the road, corn fields, clouds. There are also a few encounters with other people, strangers, along the road. But in this film, Lynch is not determined to expose the nightmare lurking under the surface of small town harmony, rather, he depicts the people that Alvin meets as genuinely friendly.
In one brilliant scene, the camera slooowly pans from the road, to the clouds, and just as slooowly tracks back to the road again. Damn! it works in just the offbeat way that Lynch is getting at. Angelo Badalementi's soundtrack only adds to the beauty of these outdoors scenes.
Perhaps there are dimensions in this film that should make me mad. There is one scene in which committment to family becomes ridiculously saccharine. But that is only one scene. With the exception of that scene, The Straight story is a good film about bad conscience and wanting to change things that appear unchangeable.
The straight story proves the point that goodness is not uninteresting as a theme in art. But Lynch doen't focus on the ACT of reconciliation. In the last scene, Lyle and Alvin sit quietly on the porch. There is no need for words.

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.