A Pirate's Life for Me

Film: The Pirates! Band of Misfits
Format: Market Square Cinema.

Sue and Gail went to a dance performance yesterday, and I was left at home with my younger daughter, Maxine. Mack was bored and the day was rainy, which left out gokarting, so I took her to see The Pirates! Band of Misfits rather than taking her bowling. I’m a fan of Aardman Animation; I love Wallace and Gromit in their many iterations, and I’ve been of the opinion that Chicken Run should be on this list. So, while she wanted to see it, I have to admit that I wanted to see it, too.

We’re introduced early to our main characters. Leading this particular ship of crusty pirates is (and yes, this is his name) The Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant). He is nobly assisted by The Pirate with a Scarf (Martin Freeman), who also goes by Number Two. Our other pirates are similarly named: The Pirate with Gout (Brendan Gleeson), Albino Pirate (Anton Yelchin), The Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate (Ashely Jensen—the character wears a false orange beard made of carpet), and The Pirate Who Likes Sunsets and Kittens (Al Roker). They aren’t very good pirates, and tend to be most excited about Ham Nite on the ship. But they all agree that the best thing about being a pirate is Polly, the ship’s mascot.

The Pirate Captain wants nothing more than to win the Pirate of the Year contest. Sadly, he isn’t a successful pirate, and the bounty on his head is a mere 12 doubloons. Standing in his way of the honor are Peg Leg Hastings (Lenny Henry), Cutlass Liz (Salma Hayek), and Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven). Despite the fact that he’s out of his depth, The Pirate Captain goes back to sea and a-raiding, but never has any success.

On his last attempt, he raids The Beagle, Charles Darwin’s ship. Darwin (David Tennant) is depressed because girls don’t like him, and while he doesn’t like being raided, he makes an incredible discovery. The Pirate Captain’s mascot isn’t a parrot, but a dodo, a bird thought to be extinct for hundreds of years. Darwin convinces The Pirate Captain to take Polly to London for the Scientific Discovery of the Year contest, which comes with untold riches. The problems here are two-fold. First, it’s soon evident that Darwin wants to steal Polly for himself. Second, Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) hates pirates. Hates them.

That’s our set-up, and the film follows from that. There are a couple of twists along the way which are better left to the film to reveal instead of me, because they’re pretty entertaining. That said, the actual events of the film are not really that surprising. This is a film that doesn’t quite telegraph itself, but that doesn’t do anything that is completely out of the norm. That’s expected, since this is a family film. I wasn’t honestly expecting this to go somewhere different. I knew everything would end up happily, and I’m okay with that.

The character of Charles Darwin is where I take issue with the film. I don’t have a problem with poking fun at Darwin or portraying him as something of a spineless nerd. He wasn’t, to my knowledge, but it works for the film. I love the fact that when we return to London and enter his home, we discover that he has a monkey butler named Mr. Bobo. Darwin tells us that his original theory was that if he put clothing and a monocle on a monkey, it would turn him into something like a “man-panzee.” It’s cute, and Mr. Bobo is a great character.

No, where I have a problem is how Darwin works in the film. He’s comic relief, and that’s fine, but he’s also a criminal. Darwin is a scientific hero; the man is unarguably one of the most important scientists in the history of the world. Did we need to make him a criminal? Was it necessary to essentially equate Darwin with evil? There’s already a culture of anti-science in the United States and elsewhere, and we already live in a world where kids (and many, many adults) distrust science because it doesn’t agree with their multi-centuries-old holy book. Making this incredibly important figure a weak-minded criminal isn’t going to help.

Beyond that, I enjoyed the film. The animation is beautiful and seamless, and proof that Aardman has continually learned from its past films and gotten better and better. So, the story is intentionally silly and fun, and the visuals are as good as you have seen from this style of animation. You could do a lot worse than to take your kids to this, but do me the favor of explaining the importance of Darwin to them when you leave the theater.

As a final note, I saw the 3D version. I typically hate 3D, but it was well done here.

Why to watch The Pirates! Band of Misfits: Great claymation is a rarity, and wonderful to behold.
Why not to watch: Do we really have to make one of science’s greatest heroes a villain?

Blown Away

Film: Une Histoire de Vent (A Tale of the Wind)
Format: Internet video on laptop.

I don’t always get along well with films that are about artistic expression rather than a story, but I’m learning. Films like Une Histoire de Vent (A Tale of the Wind) help. This is an odd little film, one that doesn’t really even attempt a plot or much of a narrative, but it is surprisingly beautiful and startling. While the film tends to be classified as a documentary, it is much less and much more than this. There is a strong pulse of magical realism to this film, a sense that the world in which our filmmaker lives is both physical and deeply touched by the spiritual.

In this film, the last of Joris Ivens’s 60 year career, is an attempt to film the wind, something patently impossible, of course. In essence, Ivens travels to China to film the effects of the wind, both as a thing itself and as a sort of metaphor for the constancy of change in the world. Once in China, Ivens spends time in the Gobi Desert, discovering that the wind has not yet arrived.

It is here that things begin to move into the realm of surrealism and magical realism. While Ivens visits an old Tai Chi master, a character from traditional Chinese theater arrives and observers their conversation. It appears that Ivens’s fascination with the wind has a physical basis—he is a lifelong asthmatic, and tells the old master that he has only half a lung with which to breathe. The old master shows him some of his forms, and the Chinese character tosses a banana peel on the ground, causing the master to slip.

While waiting for the wind to arrive, Ivens collapses and is take to the hospital. In the hospital, the old man (he was 90 when the film was made, and I can only hope to look half as good at that age) has a sort of fever dream that transports him into the film La Voyage dans la Lune, taking him to the moon where he meets Chang’e, a sort of Chinese goddess. She tells him that on the moon, there is no wind, a reality that Ivens finds especially disheartening. Back on Earth, there is a staged and stylized marriage taking place while a representative of the Chinese government makes a speech about the prosperity of the local district. There are also characters of traditional theater here, particularly the same ones that appear in the bulk of Farewell, My Concubine as well as the panther-faced man from earlier. He unplugs the speaker’s microphone and plays rock music, and suddenly Ivens appears in the same make-up.

Ivens is taken to a cavern that contains a mask from which a constant powerful wind blows. He meets the man who made it, and the man gives it to him; Ivens returns the favor by giving the mask maker a copy of one of early films. Ivens is then carried to a mountaintop where he films and listens to the wind. For me, this is the true heart of the film, the real emotional core. As he sits on the mountain, microphone dangling in front of him, it soon becomes evident that we can hear voices in the wind. In a variety of languages, the wind speaks to us, each voice representing a different wind. Slowly, the sound of the actual wind dies off, and all that is left are the sounds of the speaking—a tornado in Nebraska, the original wind of creation.

Ivens and co-director Marceline Loridan decide to film the Terracotta Army near the Great Wall of China, but are given permission to film for only 10 minutes. Instead, they buy dozens of replica statues and films these.

Back in the desert, we are still waiting for the wind to arrive. An old woman shows up and tells them that she can bring the wind. She draws a pattern in the sand while Ivens yells at the desert for the wind to blow and remake the landscape. As she finishes draw, the wind arrives.

Une Histoire de Vent is a queer duck of a film, a strange little piece of film that has no real point or plot other than simply being what it is. Ivens’s physical frailty becomes more and more evident as the film goes on. Early on, he walks, then is carried in a chair and walks with a cane on the mountaintop. By the end of the film, he is being pushed in a wheelchair around his terracotta replicas. His desire to film the wind in action in many ways seems to be what is keeping him alive.

I don’t know that I fully have understood this film, but I found it very much worth watching. It is a film of surprising and stunning beauty, a world of reality and make-believe, a sort of cinematic interior life or mental construct. It’s a difficult film to recommend because of its inherent strangeness and lack of real plot, but it is a decidedly memorable experience.

If you’re up for something weird, you may find much to take your breath away by clicking here.

Why to watch Une Histoire de Vent: Beauty, peace, and art.
Why not to watch: It’s hard to tell if it goes anywhere sometimes.

Gamesmanship

Film: Sleuth
Format: Internet video on laptop.

Years ago, when I was a relatively young lad, I was watching television with my father when a movie came on. My dad has always been a fan of the intricate, especially when it comes to puzzles and mysteries. He’s brilliant with crossword puzzles, for instance. I could tell right away that Dad really enjoyed this movie, and I think he’d seen it before. The film in question was Sleuth, which I just watched again for the first time in about 30 years.

I can’t explain why this film has been so difficult for me to find, considering the both stars, Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, and the director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, were nominated for Oscars. But NetFlix doesn’t have it (they have the remake with Caine and Jude Law) and my library system doesn’t have it. Sleuth, for all its greatness, is nearly impossible to find, which is a damn shame.

This is a film that I’ve wanted to rewatch for some time, and I’m happy to say that it did not disappoint. Here’s the thing about Sleuth: I remembered this movie almost perfectly. I didn’t remember all of the details, but I did remember many of them, and I also remembered al of the major plot points, the double crosses, and the twists. I hadn’t seen this movie in at least three decades (possibly more), but I still remembered the details.

This is a devious little tale that starts simply and builds through its two plus hours. We start with a pair of gentlemen meeting in a beautiful English garden. The older man is Andrew Wyke (Olivier), a member of the gentry and a writer of detective novels of the sort made popular by Agatha Christie. In Wyke’s books, his detective Merrydew always has all of the answers while the police are bumbling simpletons constantly in awe of the great man’s brilliance. The younger man is Milo Tindle (Caine), who runs a couple of hairdressers’ shops. It would seem they have little in common, but there is one important point between them. That single fact is that Milo is having an affair with Andrew’s wife.

And now we take a turn for the surreal and strange. Andrew has decided that he doesn’t much love his wife anyway. Besides, he’s got a mistress already. The problem as he sees it is Marguerite, his wife. Poor Milo doesn’t have a great deal of money, and Marguerite is used to being kept in something much more than simple style. His worry is that after a few weeks with Milo and living in poverty, she’ll come crawling back, and he can’t have that. Instead, he proposes something of a game. The idea is that Milo will break into the house in disguise, “steal” Marguerite’s jewelry, and fence it through a fence that Andrew has arranged. This will give them enough money to live decently and keep Marguerite away for good.

Of course, that really isn’t what Andrew is after. Instead, this becomes a double cross. Andrew, once he has Milo completely in an unexplainable position, he shoots him.

I’m not going to spoil this, because this is a film that deserves to be watched cold. Knowing the set-up (slightly less than the first half of the film) is enough to get you going without ruining the wildly entertaining second act or the vicious, revenge-served-cold third act in which both Caine and Olivier earn every bit of their Oscar nominations.

Sleuth is fascinating and entertaining, a film that never slows up or gets dull. Our two main characters are well drawn and fully three-dimensional. Olivier is a man too sold on his own talent and breeding and very much on his own intelligence and skill as a gamesman. Caine is ruthless and low, but charming, the sort of man with a hint of danger about him, but in a way that is almost impossible to put a name to. The joy here is in part with the intricate and detailed plot. What’s more of a joy, though, is the fact that the two men woul are battling each other through the entirety of the film are both smart and devious.

I like this film a lot, and I’m happy to have had the chance to watch it again. I cannot fathom why it is so difficult to find (again, the remake is ubiquitous at every place that sells movies of which I am a sometime patron). If I ever found this film on a shelf, I’d buy it because it’s a film that deserves to be watched more than once. Admittedly, the plot twists don’t hold up to multiple viewings—the film is less effective when you know what happens next. The rewatching is more for the joy of seeing Olivier and Caine work with such a great script and in such a magnificent setting.

It’s worth noting that this was Mankiewicz’s final film. It’s a hell of a last film and shows that even toward the end of his career, he lost none of his ability to surprise an audience, shock them, or simply wow them with the tale unfolding on screen.

If you can find Sleuth at a rental store or your library, get it and watch it, and bask in two of the finest performances of the 1970s. If you can’t find it, set aside some time, pour yourself a glass of something posh, and click here.

Why to watch Sleuth: It’s a great damn story.
Why not to watch: The middle part is more obvious to the audience than it should be.

Plain Jane

Film: The Heiress
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I work with a guy named Ron who has a thing for Olivia de Havilland. We’ve discussed this back and forth with him pushing de Havilland and me stumping for Barbara Stanwyck. While I won’t ever give over to Ron on this, he’s got me in the fact that Olivia de Havilland won a pair of Oscars and Stanwyck, for all her nominations, got skunked. One of those Oscars came from her role in The Heiress.

This is a strangely dark and angry little romance of both manners and ill manners. Young Catherine Sloper (de Havilland) lives a quiet and solitary life with her father, Dr. Austin Sloper (Ralph Richardson) and her aunt, Lavinia Penniman (Miriam Hopkins). She is a plain girl, shy and retiring, and spends her time doting on her father and tending to her embroidery. Her father compares her unfavorably to her late mother, who was vibrant and lovely. Her aunt, though, sees the good in her and wants nothing more than for her to be happy.

Enter Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift), who immediately takes a liking to the girl and begins to pursue her romantically. At least that’s what he claims. Her father seems to disagree, though, thinking that Morris is after her for her inheritance. She’s inherited a tidy sum from her late mother, and stands to inherit twice that amount more when her father dies. Morris, we soon discover, is fairly dissolute. He spent his own fortune roaming around Europe, buying himself the finest clothing, and essentially ignoring his widowed sister and her five children. With that as his history, Dr. Sloper smells a bit of a rat.

The awkward Catherine refuses to see this and is convinced that he loves her for her and not for her money. Morris comes to plead his case, and does so unsuccessfully. He creates a plot to elope with Catherine in two nights, but she convinces him that they should elope that very evening. Running off to a small church and marrying, and damn the inheritance, since her father has threatened to rewrite his will should she marry Morris.

In a stunning turn of unexpected assholery, though, Morris doesn’t show up. Instead, he borrows money for passage and goes to California, completely avoiding the situation and abandoning Catherine to spinsterhood. Eventually, Dr. Sloper dies, and while he threatens to cut off Catherine’s inheritance, he does not, leaving her a very wealthy woman.

Of course, Morris returns. The remaining 15 minutes or so of the film, though are too good to spoil, so I won’t. Suffice to say that the ending is extremely satisfying.

There’s a lot of this film that really works, and a lot of what works is de Havilland. She was, as most of the classic Hollywood legends were, a stunningly attractive woman. Here, she is made plain and average. She’s not unattractive; she’s just very, very ordinary. She also tones down her vibrant personality in exchange for one that is painfully shy and drab. It’s a transformation similar to that of Charlize Theron in a film like Monster, or her own transformation in The Snake Pit.

I also like the performance of Ralph Richardson here. He’s generally an actor I enjoy watching, and in this film, he has a tendency to steal most of the scenes he is in. He plays the doctor with a combination of supreme knowledge and decided malice. One of the most effective scenes here is when he confronts Catherine about the real motives of Morris, telling her that she has no real good qualities save that her embroidery is consistently good. It’s a magnificent moment for both actors—he, acting as a doctor performing what he sees as lifesaving surgery without emotion, and she, realizing in that moment (as she tells Lavinia) that her own father dislikes her. His lack of emotion and her flood of realization at this cruelty are both palpable.

I should mention Montgomery Clift here. He’s certainly a capable actor, as his career attests, but I don’t love him here. Most of what draws me away from him is his accent. There is a touch of England in most of the characters in the film, while Clift comes across as a bit of a hick, like the lone American in a British drawing room drama. There’s something off-putting about the way he speaks throughout the film. Couple this with the fact that not a single person uses a single contraction, and there are times when the proceedings feel a bit too stiff and formal, or as formal as they can be when one person can’t seem to get the hang sounding like everyone else.

Regardless of that, The Heiress is a masterful film, precise and measured, and served with exactly the right combination of emotional reactions at exactly the right time. I have a feeling that this is a film that I will revisit again in the future, and I look forward to doing so. As much as I hate to say it, Ron might be onto something here.

Why to watch The Heiress: Olivia de Havilland at her very best, and an ending that is surprising.
Why not to watch: Montgomery Clift’s accent.

The End of Chaplin

Film: City Lights; Monsieur Verdoux
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on rockin’ flatscreen.

I enjoy silent comedies quite a bit. Of the great silent comedians, I enjoy Harold Lloyd, I have great respect for Chaplin, and I have a deep and abiding love for Buster Keaton. Naturally, this means I watched all of Keaton’s films pretty quickly. Chaplin I’ve been savoring a bit, at least until now. The three comedians were all quite different. Lloyd was in many ways the most American in his characters’ outlook. Keaton offered a more zen outlook on his comedy. Chaplin is all about the pathos.

City Lights doesn’t stray too far from the formula that worked for him his entire career. Like most silent comedies, the plot is very simple. The action tends to drive that simple plot forward very slowly, because the action is more about the slapstick than the actual story. In this case, the plot is pretty easily resolved, with the additional material there only for laughs.

That’s not a bad thing—these are good laughs. Chaplin plays his trademark Tramp character. Early on, he encounters a blind flower seller (Virginia Cherrill) and becomes smitten by her beauty and her tragedy. He also rescues a man (Harry Myers) about to commit suicide. These two things seem unrelated, but will merge as the film closes. It turns out that the man the Tramp rescues is a drunken millionaire. He thanks our hero by taking him out for a night on the town. The problem is that when he wakes up and sobers up, he has no memory of the previous night—not his suicide attempt, his rescue, or the evening that followed.

In the mean time, the Tramp spends time with the blind flower girl, and discovers that there is an expensive operation that can cure her blindness. He also discovers that the girl owes her landlord rent and is about to be evicted. Unable to get the millionaire to remember him, the Tramp takes (and subsequently loses) a job as a street sweeper. Eventually, his only recourse to cash for the girl is to sign up for a boxing match. He makes a deal with the other boxer to throw the fight and split the $50 purse, but is forced to fight another man instead, who won’t take the deal.

Of course, this is a comedy, which means it has to work out in the end. The ending is sweet and heartfelt, if perhaps a bit twee. But it’s cute and impossible not to smile at.

But the plot, sweet as it may be, is not the reason to pay attention here. The whole purpose of the film is to see what Chaplin does throughout. The gags are as good as we’ve come to expect from Chaplin, with the boxing match near the end a true highpoint in not just the film, but in his catalog. It’s silly stuff, the kind of thing that young children would find riotously funny today (at least the non-jaded children, and even some of them). One of Chaplin’s great talents was finding a gag and playing it as many different ways as he could—the back and forth shuffle of Chaplin, his opponent, and the referee here being a prime example.

For many people, City Lights is Chaplin at his finest. That’s a hard thing to argue against, even if my preference might be more for the opening half hour of Modern Times. There’s no doubting that while his last silent film is stronger in places, City Lights is more consistently funny and on plot all the way through.

If anything, I’d have liked this to be a little longer. Chaplin was and is a joy, and a running time of under 90 minutes feels like short change.

That shorter running time may have better served Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, because at the 90 minute mark here, I was ready for the film to be over, and knew that there was still a good half hour left to go. This is the story of a Bluebeard, a man who marries women and murders them for their money and property. He tells us at the start of the film that life was fine until he lost his job in a bank when the markets crashed. Now, with a wife and child to support, he turned to a different line of work (killing widows) to make ends meet.

We see him at work several times during the course of the film, and as the film starts, we learn from the family of his latest conquest that Verdoux’s latest (and late) wife has just emptied her bank accounts of 60,000 francs. We cut to the man himself cleaning up after the deed and engaging to sell the home. The prospective buyer is another widow who he sets upon wooing, a plot that will take us to near the end of the film.

In the meantime, he is already married not only to his first wife, but to several others, and he proceeds to go on a sort of murder tour around France, bumping off women and collecting on them, spinning crazy stories about impending bank collapses to get them to draw their money out, and then doing the deed and making off with the benefits. One of these wives, Annabella Bonheur (Martha Raye) has a nasty habit of not dying, leaving him in something of a predicament.

Thanks to the Hays Code, Monsieur Verdoux is destined to be caught by the end of the film. Criminals, after all, couldn’t win under the Hays Code, and no one could be seen to truly benefit from the commission of a crime. So naturally, everything will come to a head, and does when the foghorn-voiced Annabella arrives as a guest for his latest wedding.

My problem with Monsieur Verdoux is not that it isn’t well made or that it isn’t entertaining. It’s beautifully filmed and it’s acted well, and there are even a few laughs in it here and there. My problem is that it seems so opposite the typical Chaplin comedy. While terrible things happened to the Tramp all the time, they were always caused by circumstances beyond the poor guy’s control. The Tramp was always lovable and sweet, someone whose tragedies were all the more poignant because we as the audience want him to be okay. Verdoux in this film is cruel and heartless, everything the Tramp seemed to stand against.

I don’t really mind heartlessness, but I don’t like it for its own sake, and that, more or less, is how I took Monsieur Verdoux. Chaplin aims for pitch black comedy, and while it seems impossible that he would ever miss completely, he misses on quite a bit of this. I’m not used to, or much in favor of a Chaplin character who isn’t worth rooting for, and Verdoux is simply not. This film comes off as mean spirited in a lot of ways, and that seems so wrong.

There are other, similar comedies, of course. Arsenic and Old Lace, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and even a film like The Ladykillers cover similar territory, and do it with better humor and a lot more panache. I’m disappointed here, not because this is a Chaplin talkie, but because a film like The Great Dictator was left off the List when it much more rightfully belongs here. Monsieur Verdoux covers territory better mapped by others, and Chaplin is better than playing this sort of rogue, no matter how charming he might appear.

Why to watch City Lights: It’s sweet and heartfelt.
Why not to watch: It’s over too quickly.

Why to watch Monsieur Verdoux: Of the three great silent comedians, only Chaplin made a solid transition to talkies.
Why not to watch: He made better talkies.

An Announcement of Sorts

No review today. Sorry.

I'm realizing that I've got a little more than a year to go on the giant-ass list I've been working on. There are a number of other lists that I've compiled that I will be working on in the near future. With the new version of Blogger, I've got a little bit more freedom to put things together the way I want. If you look directly to the right, you'll see a few new things. Specifically, you'll see links to other pages of film lists that I'll be completing in the months and years ahead.

First, there is a trio of horror film lists that I've found that all look interesting. These lists come from Time Out London, Bravo Television, and Fangoria magazine. There's a bunch of crossover (particularly on the first two), but still multiple dozens that have passed by me.

The bigger list is actually five more lists--the complete collection of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress nominees in Oscar history. Again, I'll have already reviewed a number of these, but there are plenty I won't have touched. I'm excited about that particular project because I'm going to do something else with it as well. When I complete a given set of nominees, I'll take a look back at them and determine which I would have picked, had I been given a vote.

So, while I'm still concentrating on the main list for the moment, expect to see some deviation here and there moving forward.

Why am I Doing This Again?

Film: Blonde Cobra
Format: Internet video on laptop.

For whatever reason, I’ve been on something of an art film kick lately, and Blonde Cobra is merely the latest in the string of video oddities I’ve been watching lately. Like many films in this pseudo-genre, I’m thrown off-kilter by what I see on screen. I don’t find anything to latch myself onto as even a frame of reference for this film.

According to the story (I’m loathe to call it a legend), the fragments that make up this film actually come from the remnants of two other films created by Bob Fleischner and Jack Smith (who created then as-yet-unseen-by-me Flaming Creatures). A fire destroyed part of what they had created, and Ken Jacobs took what survived and cobbled together…this. I don’t have any explanation for what remains here.

The film consists of three parts, more or less, and none of the parts seems to have much to do with any of the other parts. Frequently, we’re given nothing to look at but a black screen with rather florid narration over the top. This narration, which comes from Jack Smith, tells bizarre stories that link to perverse sexual practices with elements of sadism and furious self-abuse. He tells, for instance, of the time when he was a young child and ignored by his mother. Upon meeting another boy, he lights a match and burns the other boy’s genitalia. The middle story deals with a group of nuns that are evidently having sexual relations with a plaster statue of Christ, which culminates in them being punished by being whipped with rosaries.

Yeah, I don’t really know, either.

It’s evident that there’s a great deal here that is, while not precisely homoerotic, definitely homosexual in source and intent. Initially, it seems that Smith’s monologues seem to be blaming his mother’s inattention and a sort of overbearing Catholic authority for his own homosexuality. There’s also a great deal of self-loathing at play. That Smith on camera dresses in baby clothing and as a startlingly ugly transvestite is perhaps a part of this. More, though comes through at the end when Smith is complaining about a life lived in futility and for no purpose, putting a toy gun to his head and pulling the trigger followed by flashes of cemetery imagery. In fact, the last thing Smith shouts as the film ends is “What went wrong?”

Really, I’m floundering here. I’m trying to work out something that this film might actually be about, and I’m really coming up empty. Blonde Cobra seems very much to be about nothing but itself. It is despairing and strange, and difficult to watch. It is also thankfully just over half an hour long.

For me, the most difficult part of the film is Smith’s voiceover. He comes across as taking this experiment as casually as possible, which I don’t think is the case. For much of the film, he sounds a great deal like a cartoon character, a cross between Snagglepuss and a carnival barker. Again, knowing nothing about Smith (but knowing that several people have warned me about his Flaming Creatures), I have no idea if this is his natural speaking voice or something affected for this film. I suspect the later, but have no proof.

All told, I’m simply happy that this is a film I’ve put into the rearview mirror and that I won’t have to watch it again. And I probably won’t. I can’t help but think that I’d probably have been better served to knock out films like this a year or so ago if only so I didn’t have to spend my time watching them now.

I wrote this much without consulting The Book, but felt I should give the film one last chance to make itself relevant to me. It’s worth noting that The Book doesn’t explain anything about Blonde Cobra either, save for calling it one of the important films of the New York underground scene of the 1960s. And with that, I’m done trying to figure out what I just spent half an hour watching.

Need to see this and willing to give over half an hour? Click here.

Why to watch Blonde Cobra: Experimental film had to come from somewhere.
Why not to watch: It will damage your soul.