My 2024 Watchlist Obsession!

There's no escape from the chains of exploitation for the fishermen of Aci Trezza, a small village on the east coast of Sicily. The wholesalers who buy their fish conspire together to offer very low prices, making a mockery of way capitalism is meant to work as far as fairness and competition goes. This means that the back-breaking work the fishermen must put in ensures their survival - and nothing more. Young Ntoni Valastro (Antonio Arcidiacono) demands his family and the entire village do something - and in the end the Valastros mortgage their house so they can buy their own boat, salt their own fish and own their own operation. The price is high though, and the risk enormous. When their boat is severely damaged during a storm their lives are thrown asunder - unable, as they are, to pay their mortgage or continue fishing. It soon becomes clear that the system is so heavily rigged in the wealthy's favour that there can be no escape from the crushing weight pressing down on the fishermen, who risk their lives and break their backs toiling for their day's bread and a roof over their heads. In the meantime the wholesalers laugh, and laugh.

So, that was a tonic to cheer me up! Luchino Visconti really gets into the thick of Italian neorealism here, using non-professionals as actors (apparently they weren't fishermen though) and letting his film play out in documentary style. Visconti himself does a lot of narrating - and I wondered while watching it if he'd seen Mexican film Redes (1936), which is basically the same as this. There were times watching La Terra Trema that gave me déjà vu. There was no screenplay, and the film also had some similarity to a Theodoros Angelopoulos film in that the shots were very, very long. It's a simple story told over 160 minutes because there's no quick chopping or changing, and instead we spend a considerable amount of time contemplating each action, and familiarizing ourselves to each location. The Valastro's home is a filthy old stone house with cheap, bare furniture - and looking at it I realized that for me, personally, it would be uninhabitable. It shocked me to realise that this family were going to be thrown out, to live in even worse conditions. Watching real people in a real place is what neorealism is all about, and it gives you a perfectly authentic picture.

This was my third Luchino Visconti film, and another taste of how much fervor was in the air as far as communist ideals went in late 1940s Italy. The country was recovering from the self-destructive impulses of fascism, and had yet to experience the 'economic miracle' that would give the country as a whole self-confidence, even if it didn't help the poor that much (no big surprise there.) The Italian Communist Party partially bankrolled La Terra Trema themselves, but were unhappy with the final product because it didn't offer as much hope as they wanted it to. It was originally meant to be a propaganda documentary about Sicilian fishermen for the communists, but Visconti turned it into his long-awaited opportunity to adapt Giovanni Verga's novel I Malavoglia for the big screen. It's one great, long cry of despair, hopelessness and anguish - a melancholy lamentation for the workers around the world who are basically slaves to the work they must do in order to survive. Unlike Redes, it doesn't strike a propagandistic note, instead staying true to an artist's vision of a reflection on life - powerful, and confident in what it wants to say.

Glad to catch this one - it was named one of the top ten films of all time in a 1962 Sight & Sound poll. Included on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage’s 100 Italian films to be saved. It received the International Prize at the 9th Venice International Film Festival in 1948, and was nominated for the Golden Lion.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch La Terra Trema.

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I also liked that one quite a bit. It's up there with my favorite Visconti films.

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IMDb
Letterboxd

Loved this movie. Did you know that Danielsen Lie has a medical degree?

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

Yeah. He actually practices as a GP from time to time, which is really mind blowing. I've never known a high profile actor that has a medical degree and actually practices medicine in between acting roles.

Ahh, memories of watching August Underground came flooding back as I watched Mexican horror movie Atroz, which grates along on a similar wavelength. It has it's main narrative, and then a 'found footage' element into which all of the gory snuff film shocks are stuffed. Frankly, it's not a very good film, but you couldn't expect this to be some kind of Ingmar Bergman masterpiece or Denis Villeneuve triumph really. It's a snuff film torture porn horror movie and as such it does well to actually have a narrative at all, as weirdly disjointed as it is. Yes, it's very gory, shocking and unpleasant. It starts out by informing us that 98% of the murders in Mexico go unsolved - which must really hurt anyone in Mexico who is watching this from prison after being convicted of murder. Tough luck. That isn't so far off the true statistic actually. Then, for some insane reason, we get a quote from Rudy Giuliani - a man whose quotes don't hold enough gravitas to open movies with, but whatever. Let's get this over with. Could Atroz shock me? Would it do anything neat, or clever? How would it compare to the Luchino Visconti movie I just watched? Silly questions, but movies as dumb as Atroz just suck all the air out of reviews sometimes.

I don't know - either these kind of torture porn horror movies are getting more graphic and upsetting or I'm getting softer in my old(ish) age. It's probably a bit of both. Although sometimes I like to pride myself on being able to watch just about anything, I spend a lot of my time while watching these films shielding my eyes from the horrors being subjected on them. It's either making a comment on homophobia, or is being homophobic - possibly both at the same time. I mean, it's hard to make these judgements. I'm watching a movie where ** information about the movie that is too horrible and explicit to include in one of my reviews has been redacted - this movie tries to be extreme and it certainly is ** It's all a bit too much for me. I've seen my father become less and less tolerant over the years, until in his extreme old age he now can't stand to watch the shower scene in Psycho. Is that my destiny? Maybe. Perhaps though (and this is way more probable), my trauma at witnessing the events in Atroz comes from the fact that they're extraordinarily sick things which the filmmakers are showing to freak the audience out.

One of the trailers I found on the DVD of Atroz was for a movie called American Guinea Pig: Bouquet of Guts and Gore - where the gore looked so real I was hard-pressed thinking of a way it could have been done by FX artists. My mind starts to tease me - "hey, maybe it's real, man." Apparently it's a reimagining of a popular underground Japanese film series. Horror's repuation may not have improved, but it's progressed in it's own way. It's reached it's outer limits. What if, in the future, you can virtually murder an A.I. entity in a virtual world - and it feels absolutely real? That would be bad, right? Is watching Atroz bad, then? Surely, some sick person learns about films like these, and then watches them while getting off on the horror instead of being shaken up and disturbed by it. That's why we used to censor films, right? I don't know what's best. I got the vicarious thrill of being scared, revolted and shocked by the content in Atroz - so it did it's job as far as that's concerned. The paper thin plot, and last moment set-up and twist at the end, don't make for a good movie though. This was just a brutal, gory, messed up horror movie which delivered on the shocks, but not much else.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch Atroz.

What are the other two Visconte films have you seen?


He's one of those well known directors, who is still somehow way overlooked.

The other two I've seen are Bellissima (1951) and Senso (1954) - all three have been mighty impressive.

With Visconti, I guess I need to watch his earlier stuff, because I like Ossessione but didn’t care for Ludwig or The Innocent much.
I heard his 50’s and 60’s films were his best, so I guess I should buckle down and watch those at some point.

They're all good.


Even the couple I haven't seen, I'm sure.

Are you actually thankful?

Visconti ranked:

1. Rocco and His Brothers
2. La Terra Trema
3. The Damned
4. The Leopard
5. Death in Venice
6. Senso
7. Ossessione

I have at least a somewhat strong opinion on all of them.

Ahh, I forgot to amend that! I was puzzling over what else I could put instead of just deleting it, and tossed around ideas like putting it in inverted commas or otherwise indicating I was being sarcastic.

We've got ourselves a school teacher/principal, Hélène (Stéphane Audran), a butcher, Popaul (Jean Yanne), with a romantic interest in her, and a series of serial murders in a quaint French village and the surrounding areas in Claude Chabrol film Le boucher. The murders seem so out of place in the idyllic French countryside, and especially Le boucher's convivial atmosphere - we begin with a wedding, which is where Hélène and Popaul first get to know each other. The groom is Hélène's fellow teacher, and only good vibes are abounding - especially between our two main characters. But as the film advances we learn that Hélène once had her heart broken, something she truly struggled with, and she's not going to let anyone get too close to her. Popaul's only struggle in life is coming to terms with his wartime experiences - and given time there's a chance wedding bells might be ringing for this couple, but the spectre of death and suspicions regarding whether or not he might be the killer threaten to bring this friendship/romancing crashing down to earth.

Interesting film this - with a title as provocative as "The Butcher" I was wondering what I was stepping into here, and the first murder clued me in - this wasn't going to be all nice and dreamy. You don't get much of a sense of menace at first, and even though you immediately know that the murders are going to play a large part in this film's narrative, they kind of exist in a place far, far away from what the camera is interested in capturing. At one stage, while Hélène is taking her class out on a field trip, they come across a body themselves - which we only glimpse for a split second. It's only then that there's any sense of danger and darkness - the horror and the beauty intermingle and it's like a water source being slowly polluted. By and by, it seems that everything has gone wrong for the characters in our story, and happiness is an exception for them that always slips by just out of their grasp by being ruined somehow. Yes - I'm dancing around the narrative here in an attempt not to spoil anything. Lets just say that Popaul and Hélène might love each other regardless of anything, and it's a sad truth which Le boucher brings home in a strange yet weirdly touching way.

So - I can honestly say I've never seen a film where a central series of serial murders is distanced to such an extent from our point of view. We rarely see anything, and hardly hear a police procedural detail when it comes to those horrifying actions (Roger Rudel does show up for a moment as an Inspector Grumbach.) What matters in a very complete sense is Hélène and Popaul - principally how they relate to each other, and how they draw each other out in a gradual way. The cinematography is really nice, and the film bright and colourful. The set decoration is scant - and I don't know if that's a deliberate choice or not, but it reminded me of Targets. Stéphane Audran was excellent - and it was her performance I was completely entranced by. She really has that "I had love once, once before, and I lost it" look about her, especially at the critical moments where she needed it. It might look a little low budget at times - a small film - but any sense of it being small is swept away in a powerful final act that brings everything home via a nighttime drive that seems to stop time and make us forget about everything except for these two people in this exact moment. I was well satisfied in the end.

Glad to catch this one - Stéphane Audran won the Silver Shell for Best Actress at the 18th San Sebastián International Film Festival, and Claude Chabrol the Bodil Award for Best Non-American Film.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch The Butcher.

The Butcher!

Chabrol!

Everyone should watch every movie he ever made!

!

I have La Cérémonie already on my watchlist, but I've added Torment and plan to sprinkle his films in - because he does seem to have a great body of work.

Ceremonie is probably my favorite. But his first ten movies or so are a particularly amazing run.

I'm a big fan of the film versions of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting and Filth, so approaching The Acid House I was expecting something on the same kind of level - I was walking in blind, not even knowing that this was partly comedic, and an anthology film based on three of the short stories from his book of the same name. The Acid House is a great title, and look, this is Irvine Welsh, so I was expecting that parts of this would be puerile - but in service to something greater. I'm not so sure after watching it. It's not an easy watch - the Scottish underclass have a language all of their own, and as such you pretty much need subtitles, which I neglected to take advantage of. Silly me. I can't tell you the number of times I was staring incomprehensively at the screen after some kind of garbled Scottish slang had been released in reams of florid syllables. Two of the stories I found very similar to each other - weak, ineffectual men being punished by a harsh, dog eat dog society. In one, via a fantastical meeting the main character has with God, he gains revenge over his oppressors (by being transformed into a fly.) In the other, the main character maintains a kind of status quo by simply accepting his lot.

My overall impression of the film was shaped by the third and final story - the titular Acid House one. In it Trainspotting's Ewen Bremner plays Colin 'Coco' Bryce, an airheaded football hooligan who takes acid, and during a lightning storm his mind is somehow transposed with that of a newborn baby. It's on the verge of saying something, but does waste a lot of that potential on shoehorning lowbrow jokes into proceedings, and accentuating how silly the whole concept is. The baby (when possessed by Coco) is an animatronic creation that can't quite mimic what's needed from it - it's a blend of creepy and weird, and I imagine CGI would be used today. Bremner is great playing the adult Coco, whose body the baby's mind now inhabits. Despite trying to push home it's meaning during the final scene, the story never manages to kick any surefire goals, leaving us with a vague sense of what it all means and far too many moments are spent rolling our eyes when easy comedic targets (breastfeeding, a baby getting a hold of booze and getting drunk) are nabbed and run with for far too long. It made for a very flat finish.

Films featuring the underclass of any nation walk a fine line in trying to either make comments on society as a whole or make fun of their lack of sophistication - which is hard to do without looking mean-spirited. Often they're confronting, especially when both drug abuse and children enter the mix. The other films I've seen based on Irvine Welsh's writing have never got the formula wrong, but The Acid House often had me asking why I was being subjected to a never-ending stream of debasement, violence, hatred, self-abuse and pure ugliness - there didn't seem to be any other reason except "it's there". Some might want to compare the first story with Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, but I don't see any similarity other than the literal metamorphosis inflicted on the slovenly Boab (Stephen McCole). Other than that, it's a simple (if fantastical, sickly and weird) revenge tale. The middle story is by far the best, even if it's also the most bleak. If it weren't for that more intelligent and thought-provoking middle section, my rating for this film would be considerably lower.

Glad(ish) to catch this one - the first story, "Granton Star Cause", debuted on television as a standalone short feature and was nominated for a Best Single Drama BAFTA.




Thank you to whomever inspired me to watch The Acid House.

IIRC, he recently had a tiny part in a movie where he played a doctor, which was amusing.

You probably know that Russian playwright Anton Chekhov was a practicing physician?

My ophthalmologist (since retired) also had a law degree, which always blew my mind.

My mind often takes a time-out just to wonder at the fact that anything exists, and that I happen to exist in the midst of it all - part of whatever this is, as a member of a unique class of life where life itself seems to be a bizarre phenomenon. Are we some kind of one-of-a-kind absurdity in the scheme of things, or is intelligent life part and parcel of an organizing principle in the universe that's inevitable? Don't get me started on death - I can't even conceive of an end to the only thing I've ever known, which is existing. With It's Such a Beautiful Day, Don Hertzfeldt seems to have captured the essence of our natural tendency to dwell on these things, and how we rely on memory during our moments of spiritual searching when we get older. He also makes sure we don't miss the irony about the fact that when we get really old, or ill, it's our memory that starts to fail us. All in this unusual animated feature - the stringing together of three of his shorts (Everything Will Be OK (2006), I Am So Proud of You (2008) and 2011 short film It's Such a Beautiful Day) that appear to flow together perfectly naturally, and with an awe-inspiring, lyrical majesty concerning the cosmic and the inner mind.

This feature starts out easy - resembling any number of funny and weird animated memes you might find online, and stitching them all together by having them all involve the same protagonist. He'll either remember, think or actually live these moments out within the world Hertzfeldt has created for him. There's something very off about this person, as he seems to be going gradually insane, and that's very much part of the problem he has - one which will eventually reveal a lot more about him than if we'd just encountered him while he was rational and healthy. His name is Bill, and as the film advances we learn a lot about his life - but can't be sure which specifics are real, and which have been invented by his slowly deteriorating mind. What we do learn through his misremembering are his fears, desires, hopes and dreams, much like you'd be able to interpret if looking in on his dreams. There's a great mix of the funny, scary, weird, fantastical and philosophical in Bill's musings, memories, and general perception. Most of it comes to us as drawn animation, but at times in-camera special effects using real images are used to exemplify particularly glorious moments.

Well, what can I say about this? Just through the very force of what Hertzfeldt has written, he's making a connection with my innermost musings - sometimes my florid dreams, and sometimes my darkest fears. He also manages to make my heart feel like it's about to fly out of my body and go soaring into the clouds, just through what he's suggesting when he takes his character at the most spiritually significant moments of his life and relates it to us. The simple drawing is cute, often funny and cleverly minimalist - but it's combined with more, sparingly, in order to punctuate this or that. The painstaking use he's made of a 35mm rostrum animation stand means that it's taken one hell of a lot of effort to get this done - but it was a complete success, with many film fans revering the end product of his three shorts knitted together here. It's one of the best representations I've seen of the philosophical contemplations of the dying man - mixed with the slow deterioration of the mind that occurs hand in hand with it. The way Don Hertzfeldt does it is inspired, and has inspired many.

Glad to catch this one - L.A. Film Critics Association named it runner-up for Best Animated Film of the year. It was #1 on the Film Stage's list of "The 50 Best Animated Films of the 21st Century Thus Far", #1 on The Wrap's list of the "Best Animated Films of the 2010s", and #1 on IGN's list of the "Top 10 Animated Films of All Time




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch It's Such a Beautiful Day.

Which Black Rain? Shohei Imamura, or Ridley Scott?