Minio's Ramblings on Cinema

Don't mean to sound rude but you can always check my RYM/Letterboxd's recent activity for the most up-to-date answer to that question. Lots of obscurities, basically, which are always more interesting and often better than the mainstream stuff.

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San Franciscan lesbian dwarves and their tomato orgies.

Not to sound rude, but the time it took to write that paragraph you could have just either A) written the titles down or B) just not responded if it’s such an inconvenience. *

I could say more about each of the 'rest' but I already spent too much time on the previous post, so:

From a kid's movie to rape horror. That's some variety right there. haha

Just the way I like it.

Yeah….no. Having rewatched it recently after you had regarded it so highly I can say that I can’t find much to agree with it here. It doesn’t even reach the scope that Star Wars provided, nor the sincerity of it.

It’s the kind of movie one might want to champion simply because it’s different and offers an alternative to Star Wars, but that doesn’t change it’s inferior in every way possible.

I'm no fan of Star Crash, but I get what he's saying. I would similarly say that I think a no budget piece of shit like Deadbeat at Dawn is as potent and intoxicating an action film as Die Hard, which is in many ways the greatest template for how to make a traditional quality action film. I don't know what it is exactly, but sometimes there just seems something more human and beautiful about a movie that has been created from a childlike wonder or purity of intent.



I would say a similar thing about Miami Connection, which I think is possibly one of the greatest depiction of friendship in the history of cinema. And I say that completely unironically. While most people would just laugh at how goofy Miami Connection is (and I do this as well, trust me), I could also find myself moved to tears by the loyalty those ninjas show for eachother.



It's sometimes nice to have a film bypass all critical considerations and move directly towards our hearts anyways.

Nonsense, it's a fine choice for a crazy person, troll, or savage. Armond White would approve.

It way surpasses both. Sorry to say you have a terrible taste in sci-fi.
The main advantage of European and Asian cinema is that it's different from American cinema. And this different often means better. I love Star Wars but there are many movies it inspired that are better and also many movies it was inspired by that are better, like Hidden Fortress, and whatnot.

You get it, I think.
Yeah, I think you get it. Miami Connection is a masterpiece.

Ehh, Corax, you're the last person I'd expect to love Starcrash. You strike me as a half-assed professional critic who over-analyzes and overrates mediocre American quasi-auteur cinema because he needs to finish his PhD in Howard Hawks or worse.

I’d take this more serious if you hadn’t insisted on Starcrash being a masterpiece.

I do agree Asian and European cinema, particularly Japan, Italy and France, are far better than American cinema. Probably even Germany and Russia. However, this wasn’t an argument set forth by me and is a bit of a straw man response.

Anyways, the last paragraph is a hoot. It’s a bit of the pot calling the kettle black because you over rate European and Asian films quite often. Starcrash is just one example.

Yet this all pales to the ignominy of championing Starcrap.

Normies gonna norm

Sergio Martino > Luigi Cozzi
Fernando Di Lio > Cozzi
Heck….I’m almost tempted to put Umberto Lenzi over Cozzi, but I haven’t seen enough of his films yet.

Maybe but neither made Starcrash

Jesus I just watched over 3 hours of Nazi propaganda movies (including a neo-Nazi propaganda movie) - I've had enough for years.

I'm interested in hearing more, which titles? I've only seen 1 Nazi propaganda fictional film which wasn't a great film and not even efficient propaganda....U-Boote westwärts (1941) Been meaning to see more before I overdose on war films.

Propaganda, in general, tends to be bad because it is "on the nose." The message is hydraulically pressed from the top down and all ambiguity is feared a potential dog-whistle or misleading message or heresy.



Fiction is already propaganda because it carries the point of the view of the author (who picks the goodies and baddies and winners and loser and rewards and punishments and has the "narrative power" to explicitly judge the "right" answer). Having the state or culture step in for the author is basically writing by committee. Orthodoxy matters more than subtlety and right conclusions matter more than formal completions or consistency with realty. Everything serves the gospel.

The first one was Heimkehr (1941), a pretty disgusting and vile piece of propaganda, as you'd expect of Nazi Germany. It was meant to justify the invasion of Poland and stir up even more hate towards the Polish in the General Government. It talks about a German minority in the city of Lutsk (then Poland, now it's a part of Ukraine). It says that Germans are oppressed by the Poles. One of the early scenes has Poles throwing stones at Germans, one of the women gets hit and dies. The poor Germans have to hide in a barn so that they could hear Hitler's speech announcing the Invasion of Poland. Unfortunately, the evil Poles enter the barn, confiscate their radio, and arrest them all.



They are transported in trucks to the prison. Notice the net on them, preventing them from escaping. This is a really disgusting image of propaganda, but just like in many other ways, this film basically portrays what the Germans did during the Second World War and actually flips the sides, purporting this is what Poland did.



While in prison, the Germans sing a song, a patriotic one, and they also make speeches about how beautiful it must be to live in Germany, where they don't speak to you in Polish or Yiddish, only in German. The spotlight illuminates their faces rather nicely, this is Heimkehr at its visual best.








But then they overhear that the Poles want to shoot them all. Soon after, the Poles drive all the imprisoned Germans into the bunker and start shooting a heavy machine gun. Mercifully, a heroic German hangs himself on the barrel of the gun, thanks to which the Pole keeps missing and the bullets go into the wall.



The heavy machine gun gets hot and burns the German's hands, so another one replaces him. The nervous Pole shouts "Reinforcements! Take rifles!", but then a miraculous salvation comes at the last moment. Yes, you guessed it! German planes over the city! Poles run away in panic and German tanks enter the city. After the Griffithian last minute rescue, the Germans decide to go to Germany proper, the enormous queue embellished with a giant portrait of the Austrian painter.



The End. This film has some Polish actors, too, who were either reprimanded or sentenced to prison for collaboration after the war ended. It's probably the most anti-Polish film I've seen, so Nazi Germany did it again after making the two most anti-Jewish films I've ever seen with Jud Süß and Der ewige Jude.

The reason I watched Heimkehr is because some people mentioned it while talking about the latest Venice Festival Special Jury Award winner, Agnieszka Holland's Zielona granica [The Green Border], arguably the most divisive Polish film in years. Some people see it as vehemently anti-Polish because it shows Polish border guards committing atrocities for which there is no proof (AFAIK), e.g., it has an infamous scene of a Polish border guard handing a broken thermos to a refugee. The refugee proceeds to try and drink from the thermos and along with the water, shards of glass enter his esophagus. I haven't seen the movie yet, but the trailer was god-awful and definitely brought cheap propaganda movies to mind, not sure if Nazi propaganda, but still. Not to mention that releasing this film a month before the elections here is a 100% political thing, and if anything it's going to hurt the opposition, not help them. Last but not least, Belarusian and Russian propaganda already commented on the film, claiming it shows the truth, thus making Holland help our enemy who's at actual war with our neighbor (Ukraine) and at hybrid war with us (Poland). There are claims from the leftist/progressive side of the Polish film watchers that the film asks us to look at the refugees as people and invites us to look at the thing from a humanist perspective. But the main problem here is that the film exists, to begin with and that it was made while both the hybrid war with us and the actual war with Ukraine is still ongoing. And here we come back to Heimhekr, a film made while the Second World War was still raging. Another piece of filmmaking made about something that was still ongoing. Heimkehr is a disgusting film. Now I wonder what kind of film is Zielona granica but my expectations are dramatically low.

The second Nazi propaganda film I watched was The Soviet Paradise. It's actually a 13-minute-long short made as an excuse for Operation Barbarossa. It shows the Soviets as uncouth and barbaric and all the misery is attributed to Jewish Bolshevism (SIC!). Of course, there's some truth in all that, as every good propaganda film always contains a grain of truth. For example, it mentions besprizornye, the homeless children living on the streets and resorting to delinquency to survive. This was a huge problem in the 1930s. It was so huge that there was no point in hiding it. The Soviets even made a movie about it, Road to Life (1931). I haven't seen it yet, though.

The third and last Nazi propaganda film I watched today was Hellstorm (2015). Yes, 2015. This one differs from the two other films in that it wasn't made by the OG Nazis but by a White Supremacist director based on a book by a White Supremacist writer (both deny they're neo-Nazis, but ya know...). OK, this sounds terrible but let's give it the benefit of the doubt. The premise is interesting: The Allies committed war crimes against Germans, too, so let's talk about them.

Even the beginning of the film is propagandist. They start by saying that after the shameful defeat of Germany in the First World War, the country was full of prostitution and pornography and then the economic crisis hit. And guess who they claim the great liberator of Germany from all that misery was? Hjalmar Schacht? Nope! Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party! Triumphant music plays in the background, as we're told that after the NSDAP came to power, everything sprang back to life and Germany became a happy nation again. Oh boy. Oh well, if that's the first two minutes and they already succumbed to Nazi propaganda, what's next? Well, many things. But among others, they overexaggerate the figures, sometimes downright lie, and make it a point to emphasize that this or that person they just mentioned was A JEW TOO. Obviously, the fact somebody was a Jew has absolutely no meaning within the context unless you believe in what the Nazis believed, which the makers of this film seem to be doing. The film makes more preposterous claims, such as the one where they call the Rheinwiesenlager Eisenhower's Death Camps, while wildly overexaggerating their severity and death toll. Well, guess what kind of actual Death Camps they never mention once in the film? The bombing of Dresden and Russian soldiers raping women en masse are true, of course, but they overexaggerate the number of victims in the first one and never fail to point out that a particular Russian was a Jew in the second. There's more of that stuff but I'm done with it. They wasted an interesting edge of looking at the German victims of the war and resorted to spewing Nazi propaganda. I mean, it's not that I ever suspected them of doing anything else. But the sensationalist narration meant to shock the viewer while manipulating them is pretty disgusting.

If you're looking for a good documentary on the crimes of the Allies perpetrated on Germans, BeFreier und Befreite (1992) is a good one on the German women raped by Soviet soldiers.

I haven't seen U-Boote westwärts (1941).