benji

benji

Favorite films

  • Blacks Britannica
  • Europe '51
  • The Exterminating Angel
  • The Battle of Chile: Part II

Recent activity

All
  • Leila and the Wolves

    ★★★★

  • Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

    ★★★★½

  • Compensation

    ★★★★½

  • At Berkeley

    ★★★

Recent reviews

More
  • Gushing Prayer

    Gushing Prayer

    ★★★½

    An alienated teenage clique tries to "beat sex" and adult hypocrisy through pressing 15-year old Yasuko into prostitution after she's slept with a sex pest, Bataille-quoting teacher -- meanwhile, everything is over but "progress" and tanks drone through the streets. All of the dialogue about sex and society is never really clear at the level of discourse but, since it's all delivered at an in-the-red intensity, it makes itself understood as teenage anger at this right-wing, affluent society that preys…

  • Europe '51

    Europe '51

    ★★★★★

    Second watch, more incredible than I understood, especially in the Italian version's variable image quality and dubbing which, like the varying film stock of Germany Year Zero, suggests the enormous damage to Europe as location and concept that Irene is both the self-flagellating conscience of and irreducible party to. While the film may loosely make sense as Rossellini's attempt to insert a saint into postwar Italy-- to confirm that, were Christ to return in our broken world, no one would…

Popular reviews

More
  • The African Desperate

    The African Desperate

    ★★

    pretty relatable, kind of funny, very aimless. the critique of bard/art school/white ppl is either too light or too confused so none of the more interesting formal interjections add up to much.

  • Sambizanga

    Sambizanga

    ★★★★★

    Was never able to make it through the degraded image of the pre-restoration copy, so this restored version, with vibrant greens, browns, and yellows, was a sight. When art is called propaganda, I guess the common sense meaning is that it is already instrumentalized to make something happen in the world or serve a social-political purpose beyond simple comment or contemplation. So this is propaganda -- filmed in the People's Republic of Congo during the Angolan War of Independence with…