I'm skeptical that this film has much interesting to say politically or socially. Kael is right (for a change) to pinpoint its overdetermined liberal metaphysics. Perhaps this is a feature it shares with another tragedy I watched recently, Osaka Elegy, but there the social milieu is rendered more detailed and imaginatively. And the ever-so-brief niche the lovers carve out for themselves is, in fact, a rather conservative idea of domestic bliss. But I dare anyone to question its representation of…
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Mogambo 1953
Not one of Ford’s best. Some typically gorgeous Ford photography, and is somewhat interesting insofar as it uses the animals to symbolize primal forces beneath the surface governing these characters’ drives – repressed by most everyone except for Gardner sometimes - but such a concept is done better elsewhere (see Bringing Up Baby) and the love triangle plot turns dry fast. Gardner, at least, is very funny. And while I’m not the first person to express this sentiment, I can’t…
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The Great Dictator 1940
Instead of a full review, I just want to talk about the final speech. I understand it is much written about (though I haven’t read much of the literature) and I probably have little to add to the subject. But it is an absolute acting masterclass, so raw and authentic that the word “performance” almost seems inadequate. Who knew the silent Tramp could speak so eloquently and passionately? The content of the speech, a plea for the virtues of universal…
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Freddy Got Fingered 2001
A film that ought to only be discussed in the most hyperbolic language. I can’t recall a film ever making me as uneasy in this very particular sort of way. A kind of avant garde horror comedy. Manages to draw laughs just out of its audacity, the sheer depths of depravity it is willing to sink; simultaneously eliciting a kind of horror at said depths, for it is simply disturbing watching a man so completely subject to the whims of…
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