Thursday 22 December 2011

愛のコリーダ
(1976)


Also Known As:
In the Realm of the Senses (1976)…
Year:
1976
Countries:
France… Japan…
Predominant Genre:
Romance
Director:
Nagisa Oshima…
Outstanding Performances:
None
Premiss:
A man and one of his servants begin a torrid affair; resulting in a sexual obsession so strong that they forsake all else.
Themes:
Alienation | Destiny | Emotional repression | Identity | Loneliness | Narcissism | Pornography | Self-expression | Sexual Repression | Snobbery | Solipsism | Totalitarianism
Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:
Jitsuroku Abe Sada (1975)…
Review Format:
Cinema

[Ai no Korîda]

Summary: Obsessing about sexual obsession.

Clever movie about sexual obsession and erotic jealousy that manages to avoid being an obsessive and self-indulgent exercise in itself.

The claustrophobia of obsessive relationships is well presented, as is the fact that the couple here are trying to escape difficult social circumstances rather more than they are actually in love with one another.

The more sex the central characters engage in, the more sex they need to engage in, in order to recreate the initial hedonistic pleasure. They become addicted to each other and can no longer be apart; inevitably leading to sadomasochism and a literal, as well as an emotional, death.

While love often causes sex, sex never causes love.

Saturday 17 December 2011

Lookout
(2006)

RATING:80%
FORMAT:DVD

Hard Row to Hoe

Above-average, low-key film about independence, self-determination and coming to terms with guilt with excellent performances all round.

An unusual heist movie with a genuine soul that is pleasingly-different to the usual Hollywood fare.

Friday 9 December 2011

Vincere
(2009)

RATING:60%
FORMAT:Cinema

Silent-movie style Italian opera of a film that tells of Mussolini’s rise to power, obliquely, from the point-of-view of a woman claiming to be his wife, but whom he subsequently refuses to acknowledge.

The focus on cinematic technique gets in the way of telling the heartfelt story that this movie is desperately trying to be. A pity, since the performances are more than excellent. But the theme of a rise to power based on using others as stepping stones is trite and unrewarding, dramatically.

Thursday 8 December 2011

Wedding Singer
(1998)

RATING:80%
FORMAT:Cinema

Lovesick Fool

Sometimes crass, unimaginative and contrived comedy that works because Drew BARRYMORE never drops out of character, yet never appears to be acting - so natural is her performance.

BARRYMORE’s eternally-girlish quality is never once in conflict with her appealing womanliness: She is at once a full-grown woman; while seeking a masculine protector. Adam SANDLER cannot match her for sheer charisma, but plays the lovesick fool well.

The jokes, when they come, are of high quality and very much to the point. This is more a film about the emotional aridity of Western culture, with its materialistic concerns, than it is about true love. The latter is a state of mind that the movie never defines, yet this is one of the better romantic comedies you will ever see because it will make you cry genuine tears.

Siege
(1998)

RATING:80%
FORMAT:DVD

Fascinatingly-prescient movie about religious fundamentalist terrorism on US soil leading to martial law being declared.

The usual race-against-time to find the bombers is very much in evidence here, combined with the some perspicacious commentary on US foreign policy and its often tragic consequences for US citizens - both at home and abroad. The tragedy of such policies for foreigners are less well-handled dramatically, however, apart from stating the obvious that abusing foreigners in their own lands will always lead them to seek revenge in yours.

The core of this film is the White supremacist inability to assume that those who do not look White and those who are not Christian, are somehow a threat. This helps distract us from the hero-cop cliches that are also well in evidence. That Whites believe skin pigmentation to be the basis of national loyalty and the willingness to obey the law explains much of what happens in this movie and gives it its all-important edge of credibility.

A thoughtful film that rises above the average cops-seek-fanatics' story with Denzel WASHINGTON in fine, vigorous and heroic form and, unusually, the excellent Bruce WILLIS surprisingly well-cast as a villain.

Sunday 4 December 2011

Oliver Twist
(2007)

RATING:60%
FORMAT:DVD

Out of Time

The BBC has done Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, et al to death and are thus struggling here to relate the same old plot in a new way. Few writers today are as good as those three, so British tv is stuck with endless, and increasingly-desperate, retreads of overly-familiar material.

The worst aspect of this adaptation is exactly what scuppered so many in the past, there is no real story because there are no real themes - just visual verisimilitude.

The White belief in self-fulfilling concepts like Social Darwinism, White supremacism, social snobbery, etc are never explored in favor of acontextual potting; along with characters to whom things are done, without rhyme or reason, but who never really act as agents in their own lives. People here are never masters of their own destiny, such that Oliver Twist simply moves across the barren landscape of a culture lacking in empathy.

As a drama-documentary of the times in which it is set - and its present-day legacy - this dramaturgical lack is fine, but as a solid piece of dramaturgy it is as lacking in feeling as most of its characters.

As Blacks are so often represented in White dramas, the poor are presented as completely unable to better themselves without the intervention of both Pale and Middle-class saviors. Such false genetics used in place of true demographics tells us as much about today’s makers of television as it does about the White culture in which it is set.

One wonders why modern tv is so obsessed with evading any truths about the culture that spawned it. Like the culture itself, the BBC remains hopelessly mired in a past that is always misrepresented. Modernizing the dialog (& the Carry On humor) only make the whole thing seem more anachronistic than ever before: As with genealogy, there really is no future in it.

Saturday 3 December 2011

Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss
[Amazing Adventure;
Romance and Riches]
(1936)

RATING:80%
FORMAT:DVD

Cary GRANT is on good form in this film about the fundamental difference between social parasites and the essentially good.

Thursday 1 December 2011

Hour
(2011)

RATING:60%
FORMAT:DVD

White Leopards Do Not Change Their Spots

The usual White supremacist claptrap from the BBC; pretending White culture has changed for the better in the past 60 years. Yet the very existence of this series proves otherwise since it is presented as a metaphor for the present.

Setting this drama in the past suggests its content no longer happens in real life; while implying it still does. Whites here reveal their obsession with overt behavior - as if this were the only kind of behavior - and, thus, their hope that covert supremacism will help conceal their underlying dependence on the unearned privilege that comes from a culture based on looting and xenophobia. The odd sense here is of Whites trapped in a gilded cage of their own making where emotions sway between feelings of guilt and those of genetic superiority.

This series pokes fun at the parochial, No Sex Please, We’re British attitudes it simultaneously promotes. The widespread inability of Whites to deal with any elephants in the room, in preferring to focus on trivial news items, is never seriously explored here in a drama that stars and features only Whites.

The BBC has a marked preference for dramas set in an England where Blacks were in very short supply an, thus, far less allegedly-threatening than today. This has the phenotypal effect on the present-day that few Black actors can find employment in a broadcasting organization that simultaneously critiques and promotes ethnocentrism.

A culture obsessing about its past has not much of a future; making this an insider’s look at an Establishment that will always lack the necessary objectivity and critical self-analysis required for a profound look at the subject: A culture calcified and fossilized by inertia.

There is also here the usual self-congratulatory nonsense of claiming to know what life was like before one was born and that things are now better; like a sex-obsessive pretending the Victorians were uniquely sexually-repressed. Only outsiders can ever really see clearly because they lack a vested interest; hence, the solipsistic nature of this drama. Unlike Good Night, and Good Luck, there is no sense that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Women (the White ones, anyway) fare better here in terms of being given star billing, but the pretense is kept up that the issues being explored here have simply gone away - despite all the contemporary evidence to the contrary.

All of this, in reality, creates a culture based on fear of free speech and the paranoid terror of being socially-ostracized for speaking out. Such a fear is trying to have it both ways: Wanting the freedom, but without renouncing the benefits of being a member of an elite in an unfree state.

Despite trendy analogies with the current (2011) situation in the Middle-East, there is no serious look at the fundamentally mafia-like nature of the British Empire; making the content of this program only surprising to the sheltered Whites who commissioned it.

Ultimately, the BBC is the UK’s official state broadcaster and, so, will always toe the government line on any political issue. A fact this series deliberately avoids while never suggesting a possible future where communication is so much easier - as now. Thus, the central delusion of the BBC’s impartiality (eg, the always-partial reporting of the PIRA) is never explored, since it would be rare to bite the hand that feeds one. The BBC used to produce contemporary and relevant drama but is now mired - like its host culture - in post-imperial whining.

Only the high quality of the actors saves this from the complete tedium of the BBC massaging its egos about how high the standards of its journalism is: So much easier than vainly waiting for a(n undeserved) BAFTA by praising yourself before anyone else gets the chance to knock you.

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Science:



No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.



Jacob Bronowski… (1908 - 74), British scientist, author. Encounter (London, July 1971).


Sleep of Reason:



The dream of reason produces monsters. Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty.



Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes… (1746-1828), Spanish painter. Caption to Caprichos, number 43, a series of eighty etchings completed in 1798, satirical and grotesque in form.


Humans & Aliens:



I am human and let nothing human be alien to me.



Terence… (circa 190-159 BC), Roman dramatist. Chremes, in The Self-Tormentor [Heauton Timorumenos], act 1, scene 1.


Führerprinzip:



One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves… There is no organ of conciliation or mediation interposed between the leader and the people, nothing in fact but the apparatus - in other words, the party - which is the emanation of the leader and the tool of his will to oppress. In this way the first and sole principle of this degraded form of mysticism is born, the Führerprinzip, which restores idolatry and a debased deity to the world of nihilism.