Everybody's fine (2009)

So... I've seen many a bad movie in my life. I've seen Hero, I've seen Pollock, I've seen El mariachi, I've seen The Widow of Saint-Pierre, I've seen The Passion of the Christ, I've seen Coctail - and probably you have seen these pieces of schlock, too. Kirk Jones' Everybody's fine may not belong to the worst of the worst but still, it's pretty bad. Yes, it may be a harmless Christmas movie trying to elicit your tender emotions but some of the cinematic "techniques" employed here are so tacky that I spent most of the movie being embarrassed, most of all I feel sorry for Robert De Niro who tries to make what he can (which he doesn't do very skillfully) of the meager material which trudges along a very familiar and predictable path: the path toward self-discovery and reconciliation. He plays a working-class daddy whose kids are too busy too see him so he goes to see them instead. If you want one clarifying example of how flash-backs are NOT to be used - Everybody's fine may be your guiding light.

Archangel (1991) & The Saddest Music in the World (2003)

I've been watching some Guy Maddin stuff lately. If you don't know who he is, you should simply plant yourself on the sofa and enjoy any of his weird, dreamy films: like very few other directors, Maddin is madly in love with movies, with experimentation, the strange glow of the moving images. Maddin makes movies like it was 1923, and this is not only true because he draws heavily on techniques and ploys used in silent films - his films also evoke the playful exploration that is so characteristic of film from the early era. Archangel is the type of film you could sit down to watch in the middle of the night, perhaps after a long, boozy night or a rough day when all you want to do is the fall asleep. You see, Archangel is the stuff of dreams, or nightmares. On the face of it, this is "historical drama" but I guess this is more psycho-history than the usual sober presentations of battles and losses. The story is set in 1919. World War I is ending and we're in northern Russia, where there has been Canadian soldiers have been engaged in fighting. John Boles has lost a leg and a lover. We follow his eerie path in re-assembling his past - Archangel takes us to the sprawling depths of memory, or amnesia (DOUBLE amnesia as a matter of fact!) and Maddin brings us there employing all the tricks in the book, and tricks he has invented himself, such as dubbed voices which do not really match the images. Arctic winter, battles (some warriors dressed in evening wear...?), and ROMANCE of course! Deranged romance. Leyland Kirby should've crafted the soundtrack.

The saddest music in the world, a later film, is equally hallucinatory but not as melancholy - it's even more whimsical than Archangel, but plenty of fun at least some of the time. So the big question is posed by a beer baroness: WHAT is the saddest music of the world? She arranges a competition, and the film follows the eerie amputee baroness and the strange competitors, all sad-sack and bizarre types playing you some sad tunes. The story is an endlessly whirling tale of family tragedies, betrayal, love, legs made of glass and - beer. A funny fact about the movie is that it is somehow, at least to some extent, based on a novel by ... Kazuo Ishiguro! I guess The Saddest Music in the World is as far you can get from Remains of the day. I mean, I can't for my life imagine Anthony Hopkins together with a talking tapeworm. The film is mostly in b&w but color is sometimes used as spectacular embellishment. Meandering and demented - I liked it. What better motto could you think of than: "if you're sad, and like beer, then I'm your lady!"

Winter's Bone (2010)

So I finally got around to watching Debra Granik's fabulous country-noir Winter's bone. OK, the story might contain some overwrought elements but maybe the blame can be put on the book on which the film is based. Winter's Bone has a rare, and raw, vitality I would like to see more in movies: a sort of attention to landscapes and how people are formed by these landscapes. At its best, Granik's style and sensitivity can be compared to the Swedish film Äta sova dö, directed by Gabriela Pichler. They are both interested in edgy characters who strive to make ends meet and who are forced to respond immediately to urgent situations, and they both tackle the material without sentimentality and a beautiful sort of stern optimism. What is more, both Pichler and Granik have the cinematic ingenuity to establish their worlds instantaneously, no need for boring batches of information or flashbacks. This attests to directors who show forceful trust in their material, a rare and necessary trust. I think this is expressed in both film's engagement in the locations of their story; the location is not a mere backdrop, not mere tapestry.

Lots have been said about the music in Winter's bone and I can only agree: country and folk music (by Dickon Hinchcliffe), but also metal, is used to great effect here. The bleak yet evocative cinematography by Michael McDonough is also key to the result, a stunning film that kept me in a steady grip from the first frame to the last. American indie movies should stop being about smart and neurotic people in New York - more indie films should be like Winter's bone. The leading character is Ree, who has to deal with some unnerving types in order to protect her poverty-stricken family. She is on the mission of hunting down her absent father, who is known to be a member of a gang cooking crystal meth. Ree is all determination: she lives in a place and in a situation where she simply must not be afraid of anything. Somehow, the danger and violence of this film actually ended up feeling real, conjuring up a sense of real vulnerability (especially as the danger the characters face are tied up with poverty, economic motives for joining the army, fucked-up kinship relations and so on). I must say Granik does a good job as she prevents the film from becoming a teer-jerker, a Dickensian tale of poverty in the Ozark mountains. Instead, she keeps close to the people that populates the story and any moment of their doings on-screen feels important.

Stalag 17 (1953)

Billy Wilder's Christmas classic Stalag 17 is a Christmas movie in the depressing way that it is all feel-good, consolation and a comforting sense of merry togetherness. You wouldn't perhaps expect that of a film that takes place in a POW prison, and initially I wondered whether Stalag 17 would take up similar themes as Life is beautiful, Roberto Benigni's film about a father who tries to protect his son from the horrors of the concentration camp. It turned out Stalag 17's agenda is lighter than that; it seems to aspire to little more than entertainment, and the cruel reality is seen in rare flashes, and the shock of those scenes is stored away within a bustling film about a zany band of characters, all of which remain at the level of stereotypes (the one with Ideas, the traitor, the crazy one, the woman-lusting man etc.). The story mostly relates to the traitor in the barrack. Early on, we know that the wrong guy is accused but the real culprit is not known to us. But rather than suspense and psychological drama, Wilder opts for pranks and adventures, only hinting at other, darker aspects. What is a bit troubling is that Stalag 17 is unnerving when it doesn't intend to be: in one scene, for example, two of the American prisoners venture out, trying to get a glimpse of bathing Russian female prisoners. This scene is of course filmed as though it contains endless comedy about "desperate men" who longs for women, any woman, but what I saw in this scene was only yet one example of sexism in the history of film where the viewer is supposed to ally with the heroes in a certain perception of women, and men.

The Big Knife (1955)

Robert Aldrich directed many stylish, yet somehow raw, melodramas. The Big Knife is a good example: stagey, yet immersive. An actor, Charlie is pursued by the big bosses of Hollywood to sign a contract. He is separated from his wife whom he still loves: she urges him not to sign and he tries to make up his mind what he considers to be important in his life. The story meanders and bad turns into worse (while every addresses one another with an icy 'darling'). The film almost entirely takes place in Charlie's very modern house and one of the great things about the film is how well the interiors work to evoke a chilly and threatening atmosphere. The story involves big business, big rumors, some love affairs (none of which are more than diversions) and you know how it is: a murder is plotted. Although the characters may not be that sharply outlined, The Big Knife manages to build up a sort of tension that keeps the viewer in thrall. This is a film where nobody is particularly sympathetic and the lines - based on Clifford Odet's play - drip of bitterness and sneaky persuasion (Ida Lupino is great at this). As a critique of the sordid culture of Hollywood, the film is awfully entertaining to watch. I wonder how Aldrich's colleagues took the film...? The image Aldrich paints of big-shot Hollywood executives and agents is far from flattering. Hollywood is the place where even the best people are corrupted and money rules over everything. The Big Knife may not change my life, but it was an entertaining, poisonous attack on the big buck in film.

Adi Shankaracharya (1983)

Given that I don't know a lot about Hinduism, there were many things that didn't make sense to me in Adi Shankarachary (G. V Iyer) - a film about Sri Shankara, a philosopher and reformer (the film is said to be the only film ever made in Sanskrit!). Using explaining intertitles, repetition and contemplative images of nature, Iyer strives to put Sri Shankara both in a historical setting and a spiritual context. This character of the film is both challenging and interesting to watch, even though I, admittedly, got a bit tired of the style towards the end. Shankara criticized many aspects of the religious expressions in his contemporaries: he attacked the sacrifice of animals and he rejected the cast system. On the other hand, Shankara is presented as an exegetic reader of the holy sources, where there seems to be a strict order in who can comment and how the comments are delivered. Discussion and debate was emphasized but regrettably the film never really explored how these discussions were carried out - this is something I missed. Even though the film's attention to myth and storytelling was spellbinding at times, there was many things about the film language I didn't feel comfortable with - what probably was intended to look awe-inspiring started to seem pompous to me. The same goes for the way the lines were structured around religious discourse. Maybe the thing to say here is that I am so utterly unfamiliar with certain religious notions of knowledge/the I/the soul that I weren't able to make much of these spiritual conversations shown on the screen.

Vi är bäst! (2013)

I have nothing against feel-good movies; if they don't try to manipulate their viewers into dangerous but amiable corners, they're all right. Lucas Moodysson's comeback film, Vi är bäst! struck me as a good movie simply because of its rare life-affirming quality. It tells the story of two 13-year olds who do stuff that kids like and experience things that kids tend to experience. The year is 1982 and their parents give boozy parties where they listen to the insufferable Ulf Lundell. The parents are a bit immature but they have the heart in the right place. Bobo and Klara are rowdy and happy teens who want to do their thing. In that age, it might not always be so clear what that thing is, but one is trying to find it. These two do find it, in punk music - they sign on a list on the youth center just to piss off the dorks that play metal there and the story takes off from that. They realize, however, that their skills in actually handling instruments is not exactly well-rounded yet so they ask one of the school's outcasts, Hedvig, to join them. The trajectory of their punk aspirations tack the issues of rebellion (both its roots in safe middle-class environments and the kids' uncomfortable relation to their classmates), friendship and condescension (being called a 'girl band'). I like Moodysson's energetic pace, the restless cinematography and the three leading actresses performances make you happy for several weeks on end. The only thing that bothered me was the portrayal of the trio's encounter with two boys their same age who play punk music. During these moments, the story follows a familiar path that conjures up the image about girls who are friends only as long as no boy threatens the friendship (to the film's defense one can say that jealousy is treated as the messy phenomenon it is: it is never that clear to the person who is jealous what she is actually jealous about). I was happy that events took another turn that prevented the film from going too far into heteronormative teen-drama territory. But as I said, Vi är bäst is a wonderfully ass-kicking movie about what it is to be young, fragile and tough.

The Yacoubian Building (2006)

Some films are strange in good ways and some films are strange in bad ways. Sadly, The Yacoubian Building (dir. Marwan Hamed) belongs mostly to the latter category. This film combines soap-opera drama with social critique and then on top of that the director has thrown in a few noisy action scenes just for good measure. I'm not sure where the film intends to go and I could see that there was a lot on the director's mind; he seems to have wanted to make a film that compiles many different aspects of urban Egyptian life. It's just that too often I feel that the way the subjects are dealt with end up being rigid sketches, sometimes too soapy and sometimes I suspect that the entire approach is shady (this goes especially for the film's treatment of gay characters). The story starts from one building in Cairo and follows several of its residents (among them an ageing playboy, a wealthy businessman who buys a wife, an schoolboy with the aspiration to join the police forces who turns into a religious extremist, a gay journalist). We sense that many things have changed in the building and that life in Cairo is also changing. Hamed wants to comment on everything: on poverty, on sexism, on love, on corruption among politicians, on homosexuality and on the relation between 'European' culture and Egyptian culture. And religion, which is here seen as always standing dangerously close to extremism or it is a mere surface phenomenon in a person who leads a double life. The portrait of Egypt is dark, but there are openings. It is impossible to miss the attempt made by The Yacoubian Building to reject official images of Egypt. Its striving seems to be "telling it like it is". There's nothing wrong with that kind of urgent need to defy and disclose for example corruption and hypocrisy. But the film's vision and stand on moral and political question appear far from lucid (to be honest, I found the attitude it adopted both resentful and moralistic), and as a film, The Yacoubian House is too long and its scope is perhaps too big.

Hunting and Gathering (2007)

Nothing is as French as Audrey Tautou, and romantic comedy-dramas about quirky chatter-boxes. Hunting and Gathering (dir. Claude Berri) is a run-of-the-mill film about young-ish people who are trying to find a path in life. The general tone is that of optimism and a sense that all problems can be solved and all existential tangles can be overcome. In this type of film, any location and any scenario functions as a backdrop for an eccentric adventure. For all its good intentions, the film fails to transform its characters from cute prototypes (the gruff type, the nervous gentleman, the introverted girl with Ideas) into people who haunt our memories. The story has its nice twists and turns, but fails to engage me on a deeper level. (The film's take on gender is also seemingly well-meaning, yet clumsy, but ends up confirming many traditional patterns.)

Johnny Guitar (1954)

Nicholas Ray is an expert on explosiveness on film. Johnny Guitar, a sort of alternative take on westerns, attests to that skill. Joan Crawford plays the saloon owner and her presence in this film is unlike any other. This film is built around her. Tensions abound and I think the story is just an excuse to focus on these tensions, the character of which the viewer has to guess for herself as one looks at the gazes that pass between Crawford's saloon owner and her arch enemy Emma (played by Mercedes McCambridge), a fierce cattle baron (but bad readings of this have been made as well). A bunch of outlaws and portentous law-abiding types and cowboys hang around the saloon, many of whom are of course gunslinging dangerous folks, and trouble is stirred up, lots of it: showdowns, hideouts, confrontations, witch-hunts. It's hard to leave the story on a surface level - the level of aggression would be quite unintelligible then. Something else is going on, and "railroad", "robbery" and jealousy are mere hints at a story about lots of other things (McCarthy's hunt of communists, some have suggested, but I don't know if that was my immediate reaction - another aspect that struck me when I watched it was how the film defies the usual anti-modernism of western movies; here it's the villains who oppose the railroad). What speaks for Johnny Guitar is also its look: the strong colors and the minimal sets bring out the tensions I talked about in a wonderfully sleazy way. Some of the conversations are full of melodrama but the melodrama takes place between gritted teeth and atypical gender structures. Its hard to explain the edginess of Johnny Guitar: on the face of it, there's nothing special here. But then again, that ferocity speaks volumes, and as I said I'm not sure about what. But hey, as I like Douglas Sirk's play with Hollywood conventions it might not be surprising that I also like the artificial-subversive feel of Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar.