Tears of the sun (2003)

There are not many films that I count among 'worst films I have ever watched'. But Tears of the sun (Antoine Fucua) definitively belongs to them. It is a sentimental and morally corrupt film that uses women and racialized people as ploys in a conventional Rambo type of story. The ending does its very utmost to show the white man rescuing both the white, beautiful woman and the racialized women - from the racialized, brutish men, of course. The poorly written story is about a bunch of yankees, a group of doctors, who are to be saved from a war-stricken African country (the country conjures up the image 'any country') by the US Navy Seal. Bruce Willis plays the grizzled military guy who has seen too much and has hardened himself, but who in his saving mission is changing. The love of and for a woman changes him. She worked at the hospital and she won't leave. So he bribes her by letting in to one of her demands: that the people at the hospital are to come with them. Etc., etc. The war is reduced to a backdrop that is supposed to make us sympathize with an American man and woman. The natives become nothing but Suffering Creatures, without voices or agency of their own. Or - they are shown as brute killers, beyond the human. The entire movie is outrageously self-gratulating. It's trying hard to come out as a humane, sensitive portrait of war and human suffering. Instead: a glossy set of images that are soaked in excessive, exploitative violence and suffering that is a mere prop for a very calculated goal: to jerk out some tears. I was so angry after seeing this movie, that I could barely find words to describe my impression of it.  

The Hateful Eight (2015)

Tarantino leashes out on American history in The Hateful Eight. But I rarely feel that this is a truly combative film that induces important thoughts about the dark history of the united states. It is, at times, a fun, violent film and Jennifer Jason Leigh is stunning (and grim) all the way as the prisoner of a bounty hunter. These two share the stagecoach with a sheriff and a war veteran. Trouble begins when they stop to rest at Minnie's Haberdashery. A storm roars outside, and inside the barn-like place, lies and deception abound and all characters go through a process of pain, suffering and accusation. The film seems to be about a foolish and dangerous process of truth-seeking - the pursuit of truth is hardly heroic.

But often I feel that Tarantino is re-using old tricks, that he knows too well what he is doing - as a technique, that is. But the references rarely come alive, the genre-playing does not rise beyond the sniggeringly self-conscious, i.e. does not quite spark a sense of new understanding. Even though I come to think of how much I love wintry western movies like Track of the cat and McCabe & Mrs Miller.

What lasts in my memory is the cinematography - wide-angled wintry plaines along with a claustrophobic cabin and the paranoia these pictures set off. The chemistry between the actors make an at times rather tiresome story effective.

Black widow (1987)

I can't resist the uber-trashy noir movies from the 80's and early 90's. Black widow (Bob Rafelson) is, however, not even that charming an example of this sleazy genre. Mostly, it is just a badly told story that doesn't really succeed in building the kind of tensions it desperately seeks. On the plus side, there's Debra Winger's dame - a federal investigator, it turns out. The case she is on: a millioner marries people who ends up ... dead. There's another dame in this movie, and she is the millioner. The investigator chases the millioner through the country, tracking down her love affairs and her sinister plots. This is thus not a whodunit kind of story. Rather - the tension lies between the two women. An erotic tension. But Black widow loses that track, and that's what gets lost - an attempt, perhaps, to cater to the heterosexual contract of what a film should be.

THX 1138 (1971)

In his early days, George Lucas craftet the dystopian THX 1138, a film that is nice to watch because of how it (inadvertantly) reflects the time of its making, the free-wheelin' late sixties. Lucas' film may at times be silly - with its religious symbols and fear of  robots and tv:s - but what is more striking is the world it builds with a rather effective visual style that strips the story down in a way that lets the viewer understand how trapped the characters are in the totalitarian society in which they live. What we see bathes in a strange, white light. All environments are anonymous, stripped of everything human - what is revealed to be a sort of void. The place they live is an underground city. As in many of these sci-fi stories, everything 'personal' is forbidden. The regime tries to convert people into mechanical responses. Then there is of course the guy who tries to break free and of course there is also a love story that makes manifest that these creatures are real people, not a bundle of responses. Lucas is successful also when he toys with sounds. The dialogue is only half-heard, as if we hear everything through a thick befuddlement.

Blue valentine (2010)

Dean is a high-school dropout who makes a living as a painter. Cindy is a nurse with ambitions. They are married, and have a young daughter who was born just after they married. Derek Cianfrance crafts a grown-up drama about the agonies of adulthood - life becoming different than what would have dreamed it to be. Blue valentine is a raw film about people who fall in love and grow apart, who fail to take responsibility and seem to perceive no possibilities of where to go in life. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams play the leading roles and they are both excellent. The way these people grow apart is painful to watch - the words that are intended to hurt, the crushing silences and the sorrowful kid. One day, the daughter's dog goes missing, and the parents accuse one another of it happening. Most of the important stuff that happens is not expressed in dramatic lines; the dramatic thing here is a slow change that is hard to pin down; when did it go wrong?

What sets the film apart from most of the movies in this field - the grown-up, realistic dramas about adult relationships - is its class setting. Where most other movies are set in glossy city centers or leafy suburbia, Blue valentine's couple is working-class, barely getting by, hardly working any flashy dream jobs (they are not lawyers or shrinks). We see Dean slowly drifting into a state of alcoholism, while his wife resents his lack of ambition. She seems to mourn the possibilities that were unfulfilled in her own life, how she ended up with this guy who most of all likes to sit at home. The film uses flashbacks to illustrate how their life together was always full of problems. Flashbacks are mostly OK in this movie, but sometimes I feel they are used indulgently. But like for example Revolutionary Road, this is a serious drama about tensions between people who view life differently and who fail to understand how much they hurt one another. There are a couple of scene that works less well than others, but mostly, the rawness hits hard.

Honey (2010)

Honey is the third film in Semih Kaplanöglu's brilliant childhood trilogy that starts with a middle aged poet and ends with a curious little boy. Visually, this is a stunning effort; the camera instantaneously not only establishes glorious-looking rural landscapes - a fictional world is quickly established - a sensually heightened world at that: the birds are chirping, the wind is breezing in the trees. It's strange how the film balances a contemplatively dreamy tone with ordinariness. With regards to the dreaminess, I come to think of the Spanish directors Carlo Saura and Victor Erice - they share the attention to the child's perception and exploration of the world s/he has at hand, a world that is often disconcerting. The resemblance to these Spanish directors is hard to forget when I watch the camera saunter around in the family house, a dimly lit place, a place of shadows and light.

In this case, the six-year old child is worried about his father, a beekeeper, who has disappeared. We see the boy's close, tender relationship with his father; they share a way of talking, a way of being silent, a way of putting shoes on. It is startling and rare to see this kind of quiet intimacy. He is angry with his mother, who tries to comfort him. He walks alone in the woods. At school, he wants to be the boy who earns the Star for excellent performance in reading. But he is not very good. The kid stammers, and through his stammering presence, the grief is almost too much too see. Kaplanöglu works with scenes and rhythm, rather than narrative. His films - the trilogy which I have seen - have a placid pacing which also sometimes harbors ruptures and abrupt cuts. But the feel of the images come first; the progression from one thing to another is poetic, rather than conventionally 'rational'. He is not, I think, a director who seeks to impress his viewer, suffocating us in stunning beauty. The aesthetics of Honey is starkly rooted in everyday life. For this reason, the way he focuses on nature never gets clichéd; the film sticks closely to the kid's perspective, his exploration, his fears. One example of this is when the kid sneaks out on a nightly walk to look at the rain. These are, for me, completely engrossing scenes.

I'd like to watch this film again - I am sure I will be able to make out new dimensions and appreciate new things in the rich images if I watch it a second time.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1964)

Tony Richardson made the brilliant A taste of honey, one of the best films about growing up I know of. It’s head-spinning in its bitter-sweet depiction of family tensions and rejection of stupid social mores. The Distance of a Long Distance Runner is almost equally good and in a similar way, it is a splendid film about being young, about not ‘maturing’ in a conventional sense – the main character resists the tiredness and facileness of adult life. Basically, this is about creating one’s own space, a space of freedom.

Colin (chilly acting by Tom Courtenay) ends up in a reform school after having robbed a bakery. He is from a working-class family, and his father has just died. His mother is a cold woman, but also a sad, fumbling creature. The reform school does its utmost to live up to the ideas of the Empire; the boys are to become docile, hard-working, healthy men. Some of the teachers are bullies. The teacher of physical education has decided that Colin is a promising long-distance runner and sets out to make him a star runner who wins the important race with another school. Colin is skeptical, but it turns out that long-distance running is a space of freedom, so he seems to submit to that suggested path. He meets some friends in the school, and also with these friends, he finds a loophole. They go out to town, and meet girls. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is for the most part a bleak film about adult alienation from joy and a sense of being alive. But Colin's running bears the promise of another life, close to nature, where he does not need to succumb to the shady ideals of the British Empire. The small circle of friends and its youthful play is filmed with a similar ease; the characters are allowed a small break, and all of them are well aware that it is only a very limited space of freedom. This mini-zone is starkly contrasted by the school's order and joyless routines - in one prominent scene, we see dutiful and not so dutiful boys howling 'Jerusalem'. A problem with the film is that it never settles where it seeks to be in the territory in which realism borders parody. Nonetheless, Richardson does a good job in describing a person who does not want to fit in, or win, for that matter. One could say that this film is about class hatred. The school system it depicts seems to be about creating perfectly obedient citizens and workers. The future looms ahead full of worry and angst. The answer seems to be a little private sphere that one can save for oneself, untouched by a society of dignity and hard work.

Not only does this film have some good acting and lots of good lines (it is based on short story) - the cinematography marks the shift from the drably modernist school to the lonesome runner's contact with nature.

Mask (1985)

I was a child when I first watched Peter Bogdanovich’s Mask. In fact, it was one of those films that I watched over and over again, its sadness never failing to touch me. As a grown-up, I was a bit surprised that I still found myself moved by the story, but perhaps in a little different way when I saw it as a kid. The sugary parts didn’t bother me as much as I would have thought and most of all I liked how Bogdanovich conjures up a small world of mother, child and – a friendly motorcycle gang, friends of the family. The kid with the disfigured skull is a sympathetic character and it is hard not to be charmed by Eric Stoltz’ a bit sentimental acting. But the best thing about Mask is actually Cher – she plays the tough mother who scares the shit out of a school principle. She does lots of drugs and hangs out with motorcycle guys – and she seems to be a lovely mother. Mask is basically a story about their relationship. A coming-of-age romance is thrown in, but that is perhaps what strikes me as embarrassing about the film when I watch it today - even though it is fun to watch a young Laura Dern do her version of a girl next door.

A Perfect Day (2014)

The war in Yugoslavia is ending and a group of aid workers find themselves stuck in bureaucratic structures that renders them unable to help. Their mission is to drag a dead person out from a well, so that the corpse won’t spoil the water. This is the set-up of Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s A Perfect Day, a film that tries to be rowdy comedy and social document all at once. Benicio del Toro and Tim Robbins play the tough guys who have grown cynically world-weary - they act like some kind of rock stars. As the well business lapses into a farce, it is his character that delivers the bitter lines about organizational fuck-up. Mélanie Tierry plays the newbie, the one with a working conscience. So, does it work? A perfect day is crass, but not always successful in its attempt to deliver a harshly comical image of aid work. The result is sometimes simply rather insensitive towards what it is in fact trying to do – the war that it chronicles is at times transformed into a mere background for slapstick and action - not to speak of blasting Marilyn Manson and Gogol Bordello tunes. The film's juxtaposition of the idealistic girl and the gnarly cynical male is tiresome and goes by the book in a cheap kind of way. Indeed, the cynical male cracks jokes to impress the sweet idealist girl - he laughs about getting laid and seeing his first corpse. Of course one could say that these things might exist in real life too, and that real people can be clichés and crack stupid and tasteless jokes. But the problem with A Perfect Day is that it does little to show what this reveals about aid work, bureacracy within organization or the psychological pressure of working in a war setting.

Shoeshine (1946)

De Sica's Shoeshine is a rough-hewn, sometimes a bit shaky, film about two kids trying to fulfill their dream - buying a horse - in post-war Italy. Despite its mannerisms and technical flaws (strange cuts and so on) this story about youngsters trying to get by tugs at your heart. Things start going bad when the two boys are commissioned by a calculating brother to sell blankets. They visit a fortune teller and sell a blanket to her. With that money, they are finally able to buy the horse they have been dreaming of. In gloriously joyous scenes, we see the kids riding outside the city on their horse. But the cops are after them. They are accused of having stolen money from the fortune teller, and are sent to a juvenile detention center. The rest of the film is a harsh study of the conditions in the juvenile detention center. The kids are separated. The police try to force them to admit their guilt or to reveal who stole the money. After one of the kids thinks that his friend is beaten, he reveals the truth. The kids have their hearing and are sentenced to several years in prison. One of the kids try and escape with another friend. There is a prison riot and one youngster dies. The kid who is left behind is angry and seeks revenge.... Shoeshine is not a pretty film. The acting is not perfect, but the roughness in these actors make it all work. The brutality goes all the way from lines to settings - the story starts with a Dream, and ends with - you guessed it. Even if this is far from de Sica's best film, Shoeshine is worth watching because of its fearless attempt to shed lights on the outsiders of society and the cruelness they are met with. The disintegration of the boys' friendship is linked to the authoritarian prison system. The kids' former bond is broken and the kids start to act like the calculating brother - each thinking of his own interest. De Sica simply confronts us with this brutal set of social conditions that transform people into scheming behavior, never falsely relying on sentimental tricks. Here, its all about dog eat dog.