Ingrates!

Film: Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star)
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.

Dammit, it’s another one of these films. Chip Lary warned me about Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star) recently when I mentioned that there were still a few on the list that worried me. This wasn’t one of them, but it became one when he told me it was one of the ones I had left that had netted a 1-star review from him. In his words, it’s depressing for the sake of being depressing.

So let’s burn through the plot as quickly as possible. We spent most of our time with Neeta (Supriya Choudhury) who appears to be the only responsible member of her family. She has a sister named Gita (Gita Ghatak) who is allegedly studying something, as is Neeta. Her brother Mantu (Dwiju Bhawal) is also a student. The other brother is Shankar (Anil Chatterjee) who spends his day singing and begging for money and favors from everyone he can. Frustratingly, Shankar has some actual talent, but he’s enough of a mooch that no one (except for Neeta) seems to like him much. Oh, and for whatever reason, Neeta’s nickname is Khuki (pronounced “koo-KEE).

Month 44 Status Report

August turned into quite a solid month for me. I started the month with 57 films to go, and with another review late tonight, I'll finish with a mere 29. I got through about half of the remaining films. Better, I've managed to get myself into a position where only about one in three is a subtitled film, since those films require additional concentration on my part.

With only 29 films left (or 29 films after tonight), at the rate of a film a day, I'm done in September. As mentioned last month, I'm not going to finish, though, since the list expands by 50 more films in early October. No, instead I'll make a few predictions on films I expect will be in the next version while still knocking out most of the remainder on the current list.

The bigger question is what follows my finishing. I haven't come to any decisions yet--there are several possible places I could go. It will depend on several factors. Then again, I don't have to make that decision until late November at the earliest.

See y'all next month.

Socialism Superstar

Film: Meg Ker a Nep (Red Psalm)
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.

Today started out plagued by technical difficulties. I wanted to watch this on the big flatscreen in my living room today. Oh, the file worked just fine, but for some reason, the subtitles didn’t transfer over. This meant that once again I was relegated to the laptop. It’s not a problem; I’m just easily frustrated when my technology works less well than I had hoped. Regardless, Meg Ker a Nep (Red Psalm) is an unusual film. It’s easy to be impressed by it (the whole run time consists of a mere 27 shots), but just as easy to be bored by it.

The biggest issue with a filme like Meg Ker a Nep is that there is no real plot to follow. Oh, there’s a story here—there’s narrative, but there isn’t really someone or something we can latch onto to follow from start to finish. Instead, this film is about a failed workers’ revolt in Hungary. It’s not really about a specific revolt, working more as a pastiche of ideas and concepts. Characters aren’t important here. What’s important is not the story of a specific person, but the story itself.

Mistrial

Film: The Thin Blue Line
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Everyone has fears. For me, physical confinement is a real issue. I’m also freaked out by spiders. I don’t fear snakes or public speaking, though, and those tend to be extremely common fears for many people. While we all have our own fears, there are a few that tend to be universal or nearly so. One of those fears is of being the victim of a miscarriage of justice. How would any of us react if we were incarcerated for a crime we didn’t commit? What if that crime ended us up on death row? That’s precisely the case under investigation in Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line.

The case in question is that of Randall Adams. Adams and his brother were on their way from Ohio to Texas when they arrived in Dallas. Through a series of minor misadventures, Adams ran out of gas on the road and was picked up by a young man named David Ray Harris. The two spent some time together before Adams claimed that he returned to his motel. Unbeknownst to Adams, Harris was driving a stolen car. Additionally, he had several guns in the car with him.

Families Under Siege

Film: Bigger than Life; Happiness
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library (Bigger than Life) and NetFlix (Happiness) on laptop.

Medical dramas are sort of their own thing. They’re popular enough on television and have been for some time, but they don’t always do so well on the big screen. Bigger than Life is absolutely a medical drama, and it’s one that seems very much ahead of its time. According to the back of the DVD case, this film was virtually ignored upon release, and I get that. It might simply have been too raw for Eisenhower’s America.

Ed Avery (James Mason) is a grade school teacher who moonlights for a taxi company to make additional money. He’s also suddenly started having attacks of intense pain, sometimes so violent that he blacks out. When this becomes evident to his wife Lou (Barbara Rush), Ed gets rushed to the hospital. He is diagnosed with a rare condition called polyarteritis nodosa, an inflammation of the arteries. It’s a condition that is generally fatal within a year. However, the doctors want to try a new treatment—a wonder drug called cortisone.

Huston, We Don't Have a Problem

Film: The Dead; Prizzi's Honor
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix (The Dead) and DVD from personal collection (Prizzi’s Honor) on laptop.

I think John Huston can be forgiven for the evident nepotism of frequently casting his daughter Anjelica Huston in many of his later films. I mean, we’re talking about Anjelica Huston here, not someone talentless and not worthy of mention. He can also be forgiven for putting her in one of the lead roles in his final film, The Dead, based on the final story in James Joyce’s Dubliners. This is one of the singularly most Irish films I have ever seen. Not only is the story one of fine Irish heritage, it is also an all-Irish cast, with the exception of Anjelica Huston herself, and she was at least partly raised in Ireland.

The bulk of the story takes place at a party in Dublin at the beginning of 1904, a party evidently there to celebrate the Epiphany, the revelation of Christ as the son of God shortly after his birth. That’s not a mistake, since the film itself is about the lower-case epiphany of one of its characters.

Prediction #2: The Cabin in the Woods

Film: The Cabin in the Woods
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on various players.

Genres get stale. When that happens, eventually someone who genuinely loves that genre will attempt to do something about it by trying to reinvent the genre. When the horror genre became more and more torture porn, Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon created The Cabin in the Woods, which follows the conventions of horror film while simultaneously playing with those same conventions.

The set-up is a familiar one. Five friends have the opportunity to spend a weekend at a remote cabin in the middle of the woods, completely cut off from the rest of the world. No internet, no cell service, nothing. These five are the slutty Jules (Anna Hutchison), her jock boyfriend Curt (Chris Hemsworth), the relatively innocent Dana (Kristen Connolly), her potential scholarly paramour Holden (Jesse Williams), and the perpetually stoned Marty (Fran Kranz). The five set off in an RV, encounter a creepy old man at a gas station (Tim De Zarn), and eventually reach the disturbing and completely isolated cabin.