North by northwest (1959)

Roger Thornhill, ad man, is mistaken for a spy, framed for a murder of a UN official and then he meets a femme fatal who is for sure involved in big plots. This is a traditional thriller the story of which boils down to boy in a mission to save girl. The secret agents and baddies are just fluff. The cross-country trek is just fluff. And so are the extravagant action scenes that have made this film a classic (danger on the top of Mount Rushmore, Cary Grant 'chased' by a cropdusting plane). North by northwest certainly looks good, but it is far from Hitchcock's best movies. Conspiracies, hidden identities and clues revealed by and by - this was a film that almost by its very nature failed to engage me, the major mystery being simply a matter of how this great mess fits together. The first couple of scenes, where the audience is still in the grips of the protagonist's disorientation, are impressive enough, but then real suspense starts to falter. This mix of playfulness and action-packed thriller is not my cup of tea.

My son, my son, what have ye done (2009)

I briefly glanced at a description of Herzog's My son, my son, what have ye done and didn't really feel like watching it: I assumed it to be a horrendously bad movie. I watched it anyway, and it was a horrendously bad movie - in a brilliant way. Throughout the film: eerie, white, low sunshine. Strange suburban landscapes. A man who is a bad actor in a Greek tragedy (Elektra) has killed his mother. The police, even the SWAT teams, camp outside his house. He has hostages in there. -

This sounds like a run-of-the-mill action movie. But instead of adrenaline-dripping delivery, actors deliver their strange lines in a flat, intentionally uninspired way. Willem Defoe plays a detective who does nothing in particular except deliver these hushed, pensive lines in a flat voice. This film is on valium, and you are put in a glacial, narcotic state of mind if you watch this: watching a detail, something happens, wow what did I just see?, something else happens etc. The style is intentionally sloppy as well. The girlfriend talks about her boyfriend, the killer. As she mentions some event, the film goes on FLASHBACK-mode. It works stunningly, of course. Everything does, in this strange little film, where one can be surprised by nothing: flamingoes everywhere, a sentimental scene where a basketball is placed in a tree, a VEEERY long take of people just being silent around a serving of Jell-O, an ostrich munching on a pair of glasses and a farmer snatches them from his mouth and the glasses are all covered with ostrich mucus. And, um, God in a cereal box. Stuff like that. Herzog wrote somewhere that he does not believe in a clear distinction between fiction and documentary. This film is a good example - just how things are made, what takes place is somehow not reducible into fiction: the fact that Herzog actually came up with a certain idea and made the actors do certain things tells something about the strangeness and beauty of human life. It is also said that some parts of the film are the result of improvisation, and this only adds to the point. This sounds pompous, but if you watch My son, my son, what have ye done you will understand what I mean. - - The spirit of David Lynch is apparent in the movie: in the landscapes, in the mother-figure played by the actress who we all still know as Sarah Palmer, and the first thing we see in the opening credits is David Lynch's name (executive producer). - But of course this is all pure herzogian stuff. We all bear Bad lieutenant (along with singing iguanas) in our hearts and in our minds.

And did I mention the great music by Chavela Vargas Herzog has had the good taste to include in the film? Wonderful stuff.
And did I mention Udo Kier? Oh, you have to watch this.

Tank Girl (1995)

Tank girl is based on a comic book and this is employed to great effects in this feminist action movie. One may not be tempted to make a philosophical analysis of the plot (even though a tank is named KANT) but that does not make it a bad film. Brainless - yes, intentionally so. Malcolm McDowell plays the bad guy in control of the company Water & Power. The story, set in 2033, takes place in a world of drought where water is a scarce resource. The bad company can exert some power, killing people who in any way threaten business, for example. But there is resistance... The film: tough girls, mutant kangaroos, humorous visuals, cartoonish violence, 90's music, a strange scene involving a Cole Porter song. I haven't read the comic book, so I can't compare, but I strongly suspect that they have made both the characters and the plot more suitable for mainstream audiences.

Zero Kelvin (1995)

Re-watching an old favorite film is a risky project. Zero Kelvin was a great film when I was 16. I was still impressed by the visually stunning landscapes and cinematography when watching it 15 years later, but well - some things just do not work so well anymore. A poet goes to Greenland to work as a trapper with two other man - a roughneck and a scientist. Immediately, problems arise between him and the roughneck, who is played by Stellan Skarsgård, who does not exactly hold back. The film revolves around the dynamics between the three men, and Greenland basically remains a backdrop for how the psychological drama plays out. This makes the film a bit problematic - the psychological points become dramatized in a way that sometimes feels cheap: arctic feelings, arctic landscapes. Love/hate, twin souls, repressed feelings, accusations, mirroring etc. The biggest flaw of the film is that the roles are strictly defined according to the three social characters: the poet (sensitive), the scientist (rational) and the wild man (wild). It is true that things happen that blur these stereotypes a bit, but the film remains at the level of crude generalizations - these characters never come out as real people - or the generalizations are not employed in an interesting way. - But still: a beautiful film.

Brink of Life (1958)

I was pretty convinced that Brink of Life was made sometimes during the late sixties. The content is critical, or at least until the final images. This is not one of Bergman's best films, but it is still a film that I enjoyed. Or enjoy may not be the right word here: this is Bergman, if not at his gloomiest, then in a quite typically dark mood, gazing at the inner tensions of human beings. The story takes place in a maternity ward. Three girls, three images of motherhood. Ingrid Thulin plays a woman who has a miscarriage, and who undergoes a delirous state in which she agonizes over her relation to her husband, who she thinks does not love her. The second girl is unhappy about giving birth; she dwells over the life of a single parent, and the strange state of pregnancy. The third woman is seemingly a perky type dressing up for her husband. The confinement of the film works beautifully: 24 hours, the ward, the girls, their companions, a couple of doctors. Some of the agony feels overwrought, however, and that goes for many conversations as well: the social commentary is at times heavy-handed. On the other hand, it is positive that Bergman does not present a reductive image of Femininity and Child-bearing; instead, he shows different aspects and how these women have a hard time understanding themselves and their experiences. And even though some of the acting feels dated, there were a couple of really good scenes as well. --- One detail I liked was how the camera now and then zooms in on a creepy looking doll, conjuring up an atmosphere that has nothing to do with evelation of motherly Labor.

Love Liza (2001)

Phillip Seymor Hoffman plays the grieving husband who goes nuts, sniffs gasoline and dedicates his life to the above mentioned activity along with mobile planes. His wife killed herself but he doesn't have the guts to read the letter she left him. Love Liza (Todd Louiso) is not a very good film, though it has its moments, and though it is hard not to be affected by the extremely awkward situations the film loves to churn out. The film's radical shifts include shifts from comedy to drama attempting to be serious, but this shift of tone rarely works. As for Hoffman, we see him doing the same thing during the entire movie: he is unhinged, he grieves, he yells, he does stupid things. The problem is that the film stays there, within the husband's edgy demenor, at the same time that the score wraps us into an almost-cozy soundtrack by Jim O'Rourke. Too overt, too one-dimensional and unclear about what it wanted to say, Love Liza was a disappointment.

Spellbound (1945)

Hitchcock's Spellbound is an exploration of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts. Even though the film was entertaining and some of Hitch's typical cinematic trick work out nicely (but did I like the Salvador Dali part? Not so much.), the film should not be watched by anyone wanting to learn something about psychoanalysis. Its teachings can be exemplified by this line, advocated by an elderly psychoanalyst (beard - check, European accent - check): "Female psychoanalysts are some of the best psychoanalysts. But that's only until they fall in love..." (or something like that) Spellbound is, of course, about a female psychoanalyst in love. Her new colleague at the hospital arrives and she instantaneously falls for him. But it seems like the guy is not what he appears to be. He breaks down, and confesses that he doesn't remember who he is. Maybe he killed the psychoanalyst whose name he has stolen? Hitch's film depicts psychoanalysis like crime solving - a puzzle is to be solved, codes are to be broken, the solution is to be reached. I doubt that this interpretation of psychoanalysis is more interesting for Hollywood that laborious years on the analytic couch where there is no clear lineage of where the process is heading and not in that sense any handy code-interpretation tools to be used by means of which a dream can be broken down in a matter of a few minutes. The film has its sexist aspect. The woman, who of course is represented as out of touch with her feelings, goes from fidgety rationalistic type to starry-eyed Madonna. This drags down almost the entire plot. Gregory Peck is a man's man and Ingrid Bergman, when she is together with him, is almost always reduced to the Female, even when she is analyzing the guy. But at least the point of the film is to prove the elderly analyst wrong: she is a good analyst, regardless of whether in love or not. But the whole thing is quite silly. // The interesting dimension of the film is of course how psychoanalysis was presented to a film audience of the 40's. The answer is that most of all, psychoanalysis is seen as a curing technique with its own hermetic rules and buzz words. --- The best thing about the movie is Michael Chekhov (relative to the author!) and his cute interpretation of the old psychoanalyst. Quite adorable I must say!

Malina (1991)

It's a strange verdict about a film, but after having seen Malina (Werner Schroeter), I have the feeling that the book is better. I haven't read it, but it must be. This is strange also because the screenplay of Malina was put together by Elfriede Jelinek, one of my favorite. authors. Obviously, making the film couldn't have been easy. How do you make a film that from the get-go takes place on some level of hallucination and/or distortion? A problem - or something that I perceived as a problem - was that you are immediately thrown into the world of the crazy protagonist, without every getting a real subjective sense of that world, except for a couple of scenes. Maybe I felt the film was too distant, or too literary (that it wasn't enough of a film, that it was too much an adaptation trying to be a film). The protagonist is a writer and/or an academic - at least that is what she thinks she is. In the beginning of the film we see her sitting at her desk, composing letters. Already then, we sense that a lot is wrong with this person. It is not as if I want a psychological diagnosis of what is wrong with her - that is the task of psychiatry, not film - but it seemed to me that I never got any deeper as to what was wrong with her. What I did suspect was that the movie (and the book?) is not only an exploration of mental illness, the form of mental illness is also a political state - we see the protagonist's father, a Nazi, and we easily think that the protagonist's delusions are not only a singular person's delusions. The film churned out more and more depictions of how the protagonist's world was falling apart, but I felt that these depictions did not bring much new in relation to the couple of scenes, in which we are already made to believe that the protagonist has a made-up lover, Malina, and a lover who might or might not be real, in some sense, Ivan. Maybe they are all just aspects of her imagination. The film lets us into a labyrinth of self-consciousness and imagination, but the problem I had was that I never was entirely engaged in snooping in the corners of this imagination. It all felt a bit - flat. To sum up: I wanted to like this movie, but throughout, I noticed I didn't care that much about what was going on. Still - I will definitively read Bachmann's book.

Closely watched trains (1966)

After finishing Closely Watched Trains () I have a hard time actually explaining what the film is about, you know - basically. Is it about a young, innocent apprentice railroad worker who falls in love with a conductress only to find out that he has some sexual problems. Or is it about the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia? Both, I guess, and more. It's a strange, imaginative little film, a film that makes no grand thesis about human existence but in its own eccentric way it conjures up the world of the railway station and the people working there (most of them seem to be preoccupied with sex most of the time). The tone of the film is light-hearted, and many of there is no plot to speak of. Instead, we have a bunch of people, some clashes, some catastrophies, and one grand thing that happens at the end. The gender politics of the film? Well, one could say, if one wanted, that this is quite a marvellous way of ironically playing with the meanings of "being a real man" and the idea that mere sexual organs enforce the eternal law of "becoming a real man". And well, maybe there were one or two jokes about heroism here as well, the Grand Heroism of the resistance movements fighting the nazis. Trying to explain the effect the film had on me is equally hard as explaining its story. It operates by means of b/w images of harsh landscapes, long shots - and eerie frames with which you don't know quite what to do (a retired father's sock in close-up, a man who kills a rabbit, a woman who fondles the neck of a goose, a clock).

Dazed and Confused (1993)

Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater) is a very 90's film about the 70's. Last days of school / bullies / loud music / kids who rebel against boring football coaches or parents. This film was nothing out of the ordinary, its portrayal of the restlessness of youth following the usual patterns of similarly themed films. But yes, it was an energetic movie and no, it is not overly condescending or moralizing. Kids are kids are kids. What caught my eye was the scenes where younger kids are bullied by older youths. Here, the director is onto something in his portrayal of collective attitudes where cruelty is laughed away as "just a prank". But in general, Linklater is concerned more about Cool than about capturing the traumas of teenagers, so this is a movie for whiling away a few hours and thinking wistfully about ... beer and stuff.

Argo (2012)

Ben Affleck's Argo is hard to pin down. It is a film that clearly takes an ironical, Wag the Dog-type of stance towards American politics. However, at the same time, the film manages to present an image of the world outside of the US that is very dependent on dominant images of the Angry Muslim, images that we come across in media reports all the time. So why did Argo reproduce that representation of Muslims as raging, one-dimentional and belligerent human beings? I find that quite mysterious. But OK, Argo had some decent moments on the level of comedy. Maybe the images of Muslim Rage should be read as a parody? I'm not sure - what we seem to end up with is a rather patriotic pledge of allegience to the Liberal World, a world in which CIA agents go to Iran in order to set up a super-clandestine mission in which he is supposed to save a bunch of embassy people by means of a bogus sci-fi movie. Background story: 1979, post-revolutionary Iran & rage against American in Iran, the embassy is held hostage but a bunch of people managed to escape. A CIA man is sent over to take them out of the country. // Argo was a pretty shady movie, but I can't say anything bad about Alan Arkin.

Pickpocket (1959)

It is hard to come up with anything bad to say about Bresson's Pickpocket. It is a marvellous film in several different ways, most of all, of course, because of Bresson's sense for cinematic purity - a purity in sounds, images and storytelling. Pickpocket is Bresson's love affair with Dostoyevsky. Young frantic man. The man starts a career as a pickpocket. Not for any particular reason. Yes he is poor, but there are other ways to make money. He makes theft an art, a form of dance. Together with another man, about whom he knows next to nothing, he swirls around people, gracefully digging their coats and handing over their belongings to his partner, as if in a strange dance. At the same time, we know his mother is ill. He doesn't want to see her, and instead he gets to talk to her neighbor. The pickpocket knows he is being scrutinizes by police officers. Defiantly, he offers himself for scrutiny. In one scene, we see him discussing about the justice of crime with a police inspector. In the end, he is caught, imprisoned - and there, the girl visits him in the jail, and something overwhelming happens.

- - A worse director would have made a terribly sentimental film about a young man who falls in love and finds moral redemption. Bresson is not that director. For him, every frame is important, every frame leads up to the very last, important one.Throughout the film, we gaze into the pickpocket's face. He seems to have only one expression. It is his movements that are expressive of the world - or lack of world - he inhabits; how he walks up the stairs, or how he drags his bed a few inches so as to acess his secret stash of money. Bresson lingers with every small twitch of the body, enhancing some of the surroundings by a quite stylized world of sounds: the sound of step, the creaking bed or the droning sounds of the city. In this way, the pickpocket's state is not reduced to a psychological set of situations. Bressons shows us much more, an existential predicament. I was surprised at how far the film's depiction of love as redemption strays from the common sexist image of the Woman who saves the lost soul, the Man, with her otherworldly goodness. Bresson's Jeanne is not like that. There is nothing otherworldly or saintly about her. She is an ordinary person who does nothing out of the ordinary - yet, something happens in that prison.

Pickpocket - a rigorous, direct and beautiful film. If you haven't seen it - you are in for something good.

Z (1968)

Costa-Gavras' Z was, I am sure, more immediately intelligible to its contemporary viewers (it was a hit in its time, it even won Oscars!). If you do not have that much knowledge about French politics in the 60's, or the post-war happenings in Greece, for that matter (the film seems to allude to a political murder in Greece in the beginning of the sixties), some things just get get a bit fuzzy, as they sure did to me. That is not to say I didn't enjoy the film on any level. Its constant movement from action to weepy drama to comedy is quite rare, and here, it seemed to work. The film starts with a political rally and the murder of a political leader. From the get-go, we know this was a plotted murder, a political murder. The thing is just how to tell a different story and to hide the state machinery's complicity, and so we are thrown into the intricacies of police work, the juridical system and testimonies with their own agendas. Costa-Gavras conjures up a corrupt state, where many of the police officers have other interests than looking into the true circumstances of the murder but he also includes a justice-seeking judge into the story. Camera work - very energetic.