Donald Sutherland's tongue
Yesterday I managed to slip back into bad habits of sleeping too much and wandering round, dazed, unaware of what to do with my free time. I don't want to do that again. However I did manage to watch two films. Spoilers!
Metropolis (1927)
Ok, what a bunch of Catholic bullshit. Once we get past the amazing visuals and how brilliant an actress Brigitte Helm is, it's just... ugh. Beware the false prophet! Beware whores (see her dancing, that dirty, evil bitch... Uh... can we see that again?). The inconsistencies that serve the moralistic agenda of the film are just too convenient. The fact that the workers - obviously stupid, and easily misled - forget their children before the Workers' City is flooded, is what justifies actually changing nothing at all; the brain/hand elitist division of society as allowed to remain unchanged on that account, because we have (stupid, inbred twat) Frederson to make them shake hands and be 'the heart'. Great! And the virgin/whore complex is kinda... unsubtle. Oh, and let's throw in some tasteful stuff about witch burning while we're at it, shall we?
Ok, so this is taking it all too seriously, so some other thoughts...
- Frederson and Josaphat, OTP, y/y? Joh Frederson has obviously been too busy oppressing the worker to notice that his son is a gayer.
- I too was a total gayer after watching Brigitte Helms as False Maria. How cool is she? All that maniacal laughter, and her crazy body moves as she urges them on to the destruction of the world. Or that 'convenient' erotic dance. She's the total hero.
- It does look amazing, though, this film. I can imagine how groundbreaking it was.
- Frederson kind of looks like a chubby, wimpy Leonardo DiCaprio.
Don't Look Now (1973)
Jesus, what a creepy and brilliant film. I'd say the first half is the most experimental - I watched the beginning sequence about four times - for how it plays with the separation of sound from its source, and the domino-like sequencing of cuts, and the way it pulls fear out of nothing. And that bit where Donald Sutherland is almost like a beast in his grief. Then the blind woman, and that bizarro sex scene, and the rest. And those strange foci and small shots on things that are not quite inconsequential, like when you get a view of the hotel room window right at the beginning of the film, and the focus on that mermaid badge with the pearls. But then - really, the ending. It's like the denoument was dreamed up by a focus group of fourteen year old boys. 'And it turns out there's a teeny killer in a red mac who is actually a mad old female dwarf! Yeah, that sews it together.' No it doesn't. It makes no fucking sense at all, even within the slightly warped psychological logic of the whole film. Honestly, I know it's not meant to make sense or be a classic 'twist', but even within the film's whole style and agenda I can't really reconcile it.
- Fucking scary though.
- It makes you realise that that cheesy Acorn Antiques-esque zoom lens was once actually quite avant gardist.
- I really fancied Julie Christie in that film. Maybe I was just having a gay day, or maybe it was that sex scene.
- Donald Sutherland's tongue darting into her mouth when he kisses her ought not to be sexy, right?
I'm in my eco-orgo-rawfood-orgy cafe, which I might not have mentioned is run by a bunch of weirdos. They're all kind of uber healthy and good looking, but also very posh, so yes, your typical eco-nobs. But they're also sort of weird. I can't put my finger on it. I'd say they all have some kind of Masonic devotion to raw food - we actually heard one of them intoning: 'Yah. Well, I'm kind of doing raw food instead of acid these days.' Oh, OKAY. I'm drinking a juice called an 'eco warrior', and it has celery in it. It costs more than a big mac meal. The type of people who come in here - excepting me, of course, I'm just in here to gank the free internet and try to get away with spending as little as possible - are purebred Highgate. I just listened to two clean-haired teenage girls talking about shopping and holidays. They sounded more mature than my mother, of course. They're thinking of 'making it to Edinburgh' and swapped tips on whether deck shoes, converse or ballet pumps were better for walking round India - and of course the fact that they're going to Selfridges to buy them is no irony whatsoever. I felt like rudely interrupting them and saying: 'when I was your age I was writing dirty stories about Eric Cantona and drinking double vodka and cokes basically in my underwear down at the Union Arms. When did you get so fucking mature? Was it when daddy made the down payment on your flat? Come on, there's a teenage girl drinking crisis in this country! There's never been a better time to get on with it, before you're too old!'
Essentially I'm biased against posh people. They weren't doing any harm, bless them. But they've got more money than me.
Metropolis (1927)
Ok, what a bunch of Catholic bullshit. Once we get past the amazing visuals and how brilliant an actress Brigitte Helm is, it's just... ugh. Beware the false prophet! Beware whores (see her dancing, that dirty, evil bitch... Uh... can we see that again?). The inconsistencies that serve the moralistic agenda of the film are just too convenient. The fact that the workers - obviously stupid, and easily misled - forget their children before the Workers' City is flooded, is what justifies actually changing nothing at all; the brain/hand elitist division of society as allowed to remain unchanged on that account, because we have (stupid, inbred twat) Frederson to make them shake hands and be 'the heart'. Great! And the virgin/whore complex is kinda... unsubtle. Oh, and let's throw in some tasteful stuff about witch burning while we're at it, shall we?
Ok, so this is taking it all too seriously, so some other thoughts...
- Frederson and Josaphat, OTP, y/y? Joh Frederson has obviously been too busy oppressing the worker to notice that his son is a gayer.
- I too was a total gayer after watching Brigitte Helms as False Maria. How cool is she? All that maniacal laughter, and her crazy body moves as she urges them on to the destruction of the world. Or that 'convenient' erotic dance. She's the total hero.
- It does look amazing, though, this film. I can imagine how groundbreaking it was.
- Frederson kind of looks like a chubby, wimpy Leonardo DiCaprio.
Don't Look Now (1973)
Jesus, what a creepy and brilliant film. I'd say the first half is the most experimental - I watched the beginning sequence about four times - for how it plays with the separation of sound from its source, and the domino-like sequencing of cuts, and the way it pulls fear out of nothing. And that bit where Donald Sutherland is almost like a beast in his grief. Then the blind woman, and that bizarro sex scene, and the rest. And those strange foci and small shots on things that are not quite inconsequential, like when you get a view of the hotel room window right at the beginning of the film, and the focus on that mermaid badge with the pearls. But then - really, the ending. It's like the denoument was dreamed up by a focus group of fourteen year old boys. 'And it turns out there's a teeny killer in a red mac who is actually a mad old female dwarf! Yeah, that sews it together.' No it doesn't. It makes no fucking sense at all, even within the slightly warped psychological logic of the whole film. Honestly, I know it's not meant to make sense or be a classic 'twist', but even within the film's whole style and agenda I can't really reconcile it.
- Fucking scary though.
- It makes you realise that that cheesy Acorn Antiques-esque zoom lens was once actually quite avant gardist.
- I really fancied Julie Christie in that film. Maybe I was just having a gay day, or maybe it was that sex scene.
- Donald Sutherland's tongue darting into her mouth when he kisses her ought not to be sexy, right?
I'm in my eco-orgo-rawfood-orgy cafe, which I might not have mentioned is run by a bunch of weirdos. They're all kind of uber healthy and good looking, but also very posh, so yes, your typical eco-nobs. But they're also sort of weird. I can't put my finger on it. I'd say they all have some kind of Masonic devotion to raw food - we actually heard one of them intoning: 'Yah. Well, I'm kind of doing raw food instead of acid these days.' Oh, OKAY. I'm drinking a juice called an 'eco warrior', and it has celery in it. It costs more than a big mac meal. The type of people who come in here - excepting me, of course, I'm just in here to gank the free internet and try to get away with spending as little as possible - are purebred Highgate. I just listened to two clean-haired teenage girls talking about shopping and holidays. They sounded more mature than my mother, of course. They're thinking of 'making it to Edinburgh' and swapped tips on whether deck shoes, converse or ballet pumps were better for walking round India - and of course the fact that they're going to Selfridges to buy them is no irony whatsoever. I felt like rudely interrupting them and saying: 'when I was your age I was writing dirty stories about Eric Cantona and drinking double vodka and cokes basically in my underwear down at the Union Arms. When did you get so fucking mature? Was it when daddy made the down payment on your flat? Come on, there's a teenage girl drinking crisis in this country! There's never been a better time to get on with it, before you're too old!'
Essentially I'm biased against posh people. They weren't doing any harm, bless them. But they've got more money than me.