Mongol Horde

Film: Potomok Chingis-Khana (Storm Over Asia)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

To me, there is something particularly Soviet about silent film, particularly silent epics like Potomok Chingis-Khana. I’m not sure why this is, but it’s true of all silent epics in my mind, not merely those that are actually Russian. These’s something about the behind-the-times feel of silent films that strike me as being like a lower end version of Hollywood that they feel sort of like Soviet attempts to mimic the West and simultaneously demonize it.

A young Mongolian trapper (Valery Inkijinoff) is entrusted by his father with a rare and valuable silver fox pelt. As the son is going to marker, he is entrusted with the pelt and told specifically not to take less than 500 marks for it. Sadly, the evil British capitalists cheat him out of his prize. A fight ensues and the young man is forced into the hills where he joins the Soviet partisans. All is well for a bit. A new Lama is discovered and crowned. Oddly, the British Army appears to be occupying Mongolia at this point.

But things change. Our hero is captured by the British, and it is discovered that he is a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. This inspires his captors to place him in charge of a puppet government, giving the local populace the semblance of being governed by one of their own (and one with a significant lineage), but in reality still being controlled by a foreign government. And this works well for a little bit until the newly crowned “ruler” decides to rebel, since his heart is with the glorious Soviet revolution.

Okay, so it’s a propaganda film. It’s mildly amusing to me that the bad guys here are the British, who were never anywhere in Mongolia, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the glorious Soviet state was doing to these peasants the very thing they accuse the British of doing. This, of course is not surprising. The art of propaganda is convincing the populace that your enemies are doing precisely the despicable acts that you are currently engaged in yourself. But it is pretty amusing that the Brits got tagged for this. Or maybe not—Hollywood seems to like British guys as the villainous foil quite often.

There’s a lot going on here that doesn’t deal directly with the plot. For instance, there’s a huge build-up to the new Lama, and I suppose it’s funny that after all of the noise and confusion and pomp that the Lama is a little kid. But really, it’s a long way to go for a fairly minor joke. In fact, the entire section with the Lama is simply to force the British to go rustle some cattle and thereby encounter, wound, and capture the hero of the film. It’s far too long of a sequence for its purpose, and the payoff isn’t close to worth it.

My guess is that this is a function of the version I got. The Book lists this as a film just a touch over 90 minutes, while the version I watched is a good half hour more than this; my guess is that this extended middle section is a big part of what was added back in, and it’s not a very good addition. It makes the film drag, and the brutal soundtrack that accompanies much of this is better left unmentioned. It’s essentially the equivalent of giving two dozen kindergarteners some pots, pans, wooden spoons, and a couple of vuvuzelas and letting them go to town.

These two things are my biggest issue with this film. The first seems like a bad decision by someone deciding that adding in any cut footage could only improve the film, and missing the mark on that badly. The second is a decision by whomever created this version of the film, and that was equally a misfire.

The rest of this is pretty interesting, and it’s also beautifully filmed. Pudovkin does some interesting things with the camera and uses some innovative (for the time) camera tricks to heighten the action and in some cases add a surreal edge to it.

All in all, this is a great example of the montage style of filmmaking and a worthy addition to the pantheon of silent classics. But be warned that you’ll want the sound down for part of it due to the cacophonous “music.” And if there’s an option to pick the long version or the short one, go with the short one; you’ll be a lot happier in the end.

As a final note, a big deal is made of the fact that our hero is a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. Evidently, this isn't that remarkable of a feat. According to the Smithsonian, one person in every 200 in the modern world is a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. So really, they could have gone through with their plan to shoot this guy and just found another one.

Why to watch Potomok Chingis-Khana: Soviet montage style on a Mongol horde scale.
Why not to watch: It’s roughly as historically accurate as the Twilight series.

Revenge Served Basted with Shallots and Chanterelles

Film: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Sometimes after I watch a film like The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, I head over to IMDB and look at the parents’ guide just to see what it says. All I knew going into this one was that it started life with an X rating, which was eventually changed to the functionally equivalent NC-17. Oh, and I guess I knew that Helen Mirren is in it along with Michael Gambon, who is better known these days as the guy who took over for Dumbledore.

Anyway, I’m going to jump right into this one with both feet, and while there are a number of people in this film, I’m going to focus on the four in the title. We have a cook named Richard Borst (Richard Bohringer), who is renowned as a great chef and runs a very fancy restaurant. His partner in the restaurant is the thief, Albert Spica (Gambon), who is an absolute pig of a human being. In many ways, he is the most distasteful character I have ever seen in a film. He is loud, stupid, arrogant, mean, violent, and acts like a spoiled child. He is abusive of everyone around him, his wife Georgina (Mirren) in particular. And then there is the quiet, shy bookseller named Michael (Alan Howard). He eats in the restaurant pretty much every night.

Albert is such a complete bastard that Georgina spends a lot of time away from him, or at least as much as she can get away with. During one of her trips to the bathroom, she encounters Michael, and the two of them immediately begin having an affair. Their affair consists of trysts in the bathroom and in the kitchen with the full knowledge and observation of the kitchen staff. There’s plenty of full frontal here of both actors, and the sex is quick and almost ravenous—ravenous because of the passion and quick because it occurs in moments when Georgina is supposed to be using the bathroom.

Regardless, eventually the couple is found out and Albert goes into a rage. The two lovers are secreted out of the restaurant in an extremely disgusting manner and take up residence in the bookseller’s shop. The rest of the film is all about Albert finding out where they are, enacting his revenge, and then Georgina turning the tables on him. Go go gadget spoiler!

*** HERE’S YOUR MENU ***

So Albert discovers that food is being taken to the pair by the restaurant, particularly by a young boy called Pup (Paul Russell) who washes dishes in the kitchen and sings liturgical music. Albert captures the boy and tortures him, sending him to the hospital, but discovers the location of the lovers because of the address printed on the inside of one of the books the boy borrows. Georgina goes to visit the boy in the hospital, and while this happens, Albert and his goons move in and kill Michael by force feeding him one of his books.

Eventually, Georgina returns and finds the destruction. She convinces the cook to, well, practice his craft on the body of Michael. He does—he cooks the body. The whole body. This is then served to Albert, who is forced to begin eating it. When he does, Georgina shoots him in the head, and the film ends.

*** CHECK PLEASE ***

This is a brutal film. The sex is particularly unsexy regardless of the shapeliness of Helen Mirren’s circa 1989 backside. In any other movie, the sex and nudity would be the centerpiece of the film, but here, it takes a back seat to virtually everything else. The sex is not the extreme behavior here—instead, it is Albert’s behavior that is consistently and constantly shocking because of its extreme vulgarity. A great deal is unexplained, or at least not understood by me. I don’t know why the boy sings constantly, except perhaps as a counterpoint to the vulgarity. I don’t know why there’s a guy in the kitchen who appears to wear nothing but an apron. I don't know why the kitchen is the size of a warehouse with tables spread about it. The stress on vulgarity does explain why a man is coated in dog feces and then urinated on in the first five minutes, and it explains why Albert forces the kitchen boy to watch him rape Georgina. It explains Albert’s dinner conversation and dinner companions (who include Tim Roth), too.

The art direction on this film is worth noting. Each of the parts of the restaurant is of a different predominant color. The exterior is blue, the kitchen is green, the restaurant itself red, and the bathroom is white. Characters have their costumes change all or in part as they move from one place to the next. Georgina gets up from the table wearing a red dress and appears in the bathroom in a white one. Her clothes were evidently made by Gaultier, and they are quite fashionable. Each of the sets is pretty amazing—the film looks very much like a painting.

I have heard that this film is a metaphor for the Thatcher administration. The cook evidently represents the long-suffering loyal British citizenry. The thief is Thatcher herself, conferring her attention and favors on the wealthy without regard to the rest of the country (or the patrons in the restaurant). The wife is Britain herself, raped and abused by the vicious and cruel master. And the lover represents the British liberal elite, romanced by the spirit of the country and eventually crushed by, as Rik from The Young Ones used to say, the “fascist Thatcheristic junta.”

It works as a metaphor. And it has to. The events on the screen are so repugnant that the only way to bear it is by seeing it as a metaphor for something. This is an uncompromising film and difficult to watch, but very much worth seeing, if only for the amazing visual appeal.

Why to watch The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover: It’s art directed out the ass.
Why not to watch: It takes mincing baby steps toward Salo territory.

The Demented Tower

Film: Die Hard
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

Christmas season is well and truly upon us, and when it comes to holiday films, there are plenty that I enjoy. Die Hard is one of them. It’s not really a Christmas film except that it takes place during a Christmas party. It could just as easily take place at any time of the year, but since it’s the end of the year, well, here we are.

Die Hard is a simple film that takes its basic idea to an extreme, and does it about as well as it’s ever been done. John McClane (Bruce Willis) is a New York cop visiting his estranged wife in Los Angeles. His wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), has gone back to her maiden name. She has a fantastic career as a top executive in a Japanese company, which might make the more perceptive and cynical viewer wonder why Mcclane is still working as a cop at all. Regardless, this is a step toward reconciliation between the couple—she has invited him out to her company’s Christmas party.

Once he arrives at the building, we get the meeting between the couple we expect. We are also introduced to company boss Joseph Takagi (James Shigeta) and international sales guy and all-around sleazebag Harry Ellis (Hart Bochner). And then the fun starts. A whole bunch of apparent terrorists show up at the building, hold everyone hostage, kill Takagi, and otherwise raise hell. However, when they show up, McClane is elsewhere, and thus he becomes the fly in the ointment for the bad guys, running around the building creating his own brand of chaos and doing anything he can to keep the hostages alive and screw up the plans of the bad guys.

That’s really it. Lots of explosions, lots of gunfire, a few crazy stunts, and an ending. There are a few other key roles not mentioned at this point—former beat cop-turned-desk jockey Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson) shows up and acts as McClane’s advocate for much of the film and is responsible for calling in the cavalry. The bad guys are headed by a guy named Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman in one of his great roles), who is slick, suave, charming, and contemptible. We also encounter a television reporter named Richard Thornburg (William Atherton) who has delusions of grandeur and a very high opinion of himself. But really, this film is all about Bruch Willis kicking ass and not even bothering to take names.

I don’t really know why Die Hard works as well as it does except for the fact that it is, for lack of a better way to put it, completely balls-out at all times. What McClane goes through is extreme, his reaction is extreme, and the explosions are extreme. And it is awesome. There is no other word for it. It’s entirely possible that I call it awesome (I and virtually everyone else I know, mind you) because we were around in 1988 when this film was first released, but there is a reason that Die Hard is considered one of the great action films of…ever.

Bruce Willis is a big part of the reason for this. He takes a massive beating in this film and ends up slicked over with his own blood by the end of the film. He also makes a ton of wisecracks through the film, which is one of the reasons he makes such a great action hero. The other reason this film works as well as it does is thanks to Alan Rickman. Rickman is virtually always entertaining in any role, and Hans Gruber is a meaty role that he really sinks his teeth into. Hans Gruber is one of the great film villains not just because he is a suave bastard but also because just like McClane, he has a bunch of great lines, and Rickman delivers them with decided relish.

All of this adds up to a film that is riotously entertaining. There’s not a frame of this film that isn’t fun to watch. Further, this is a film that is fun on a second, third, (or as it was for me today) tenth or twentieth viewing. If you haven’t seen this, go see it now. And watch at least the first sequel which is crazier, harder to believe, and almost as much fun.

Why to watch Die Hard: Because it kicks ass.
Why not to watch: Eventually, this series dips into PG-13 and starts to suck.

Turkey Trot

Film: Yol (The Way; The Road)
Format: VHS from Blackhawk College Library through interlibrary loan on big ol’ television.

I know very little about the modern state of Turkey. I know that they’ve had in the past an extremely oppressive government. I know this because one of my professors in grad school told me, and I figured that since she is Turkish, she’d have the first-hand experience to back it up. The country’s human rights record is pretty shabby, too. I know it’s a big, predominantly Muslim country that sits in a geographic crossroads. In some ways, Turkey is European, and has joined the EU. However, its location and dominant religion gives it strong ties to the Middle East as well.

That’s about as much background as I had going into Yol (alternately known as The Way and The Road). This is a film with an interesting history; in fact, it may be the story of its creation that causes it to be a part of The List rather than the film itself. Yol is credited to filmmaker Yilmaz Guney, who never actually filmed a frame. Why? Well, he was in prison at the time. He “directed” the shots through his proxy, Serif Goren, who is given equal screen credit. When Guney escaped from prison, he edited the footage in Switzerland.

Naturally, Yol is a prison movie. It appears that in Turkey, prisoners are sometimes given furloughs to go out into the real world again and connect with their families, sort of like a vacation from jail. We spend most of our time with three men in particular. Each of them starts off on furlough together and each goes through a traumatic event before the furlough ends. Essentially, the film appears to suggest that even when not constrained by the walls of the prison, these men are still trapped in a very real way. They are hemmed in by family, culture, society, religion, and hundreds of years of tradition, and no less prisoners because of it.

One man, Mehmet (Halil Ergun), is in prison for his part in a heist gone wrong. During the heist, his brother-in-law was killed by the police. Now, his wife’s family blames him for the death despite the fact that he has maintained that he did not panic and desert his brother-in-law. However, he really did. Hated by his in-laws, Mehmet wants only to reconcile with his wife and children again.

Another man, Seyit (Tarik Akan), has a different problem. His wife has become a prostitute in his absence, bringing shame upon him and the entire family. Reclaimed by the family, Zire (Serif Sezer) has spent eight months literally chained in a barn and living on bread and water. The family waits only for Seyit to mete out justice against her for her shame and for the greater shame brought to the family. “Justice” in this case is an honor killing. Seyit, as might many of us be, is of two minds of this sort of punishment.

We also spend a good deal of time with Omer (Necmettin Cobanoglu), who wishes to rejoin his family in a village on the border. Because it is a border village, the army is attacking it repeatedly due to its people practicing frequent smuggling. Omer is caught in the middle of this, one the one hand trying to escape prison and on the other being trapped by duty and loyalty to his family.

In many ways, none of them dealing with the subject matter, Yol reminds me of Les Enfants du Paradis. It is a competently made and good film, but the story of its creation is far more involved and involving than the film itself. This is not to say that the film is without merit, but that Guney may well have made a greater artistic statement simply by creating any film in his situation than any film could have on its own.

What is constant here is the repression of the regime and of the culture. There is a culture of suppression evident throughout the film and in almost every action taken by each character. In many ways, Yol feels like an Eastern Bloc film. It matches the level of oppression in Czech and Polish films of a decade previous. The personal and social privation, constant vigilance against the state, petty losses of freedom, all of these are reminiscent of films that came from communist countries during the Cold War.

This is an interesting film, but also a frustrating one, and not a film to enter into lightly.

Why to watch Yol: A gripping portrait of a repressive culture.
Why not to watch: So many plots, it can be hard to follow.

Love in the Time of Aliens

Film: Monsters
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

If I have to pick a genre that I like more than any other, on most days I’d pick science fiction. I really enjoy good science fiction, which to me is defined as science fiction that has a brain. Dumb science fiction isn’t really any better than a dumb story from another genre, but good, smart science fiction tends to ask interesting questions and tends to answer them in interesting ways. I suppose in reality modern science fiction is my favorite; my favorite classic genre is film noir. If I have to narrow down further, though, I really like films that sit at that juncture between science fiction and horror.

This brings us to Monsters, the 2010 release from Gareth Edwards. Like a number of recent indie films, it was made on a relatively small budget (roughly half a million by estimates I have seen) and looks like it was made for a great deal more. It’s a giant monster movie, an alien invasion movie, a drama, and a romance all at the same time. This makes Monsters sound like it doesn’t quite know what it wants to be, but that’s not really the case. For all of the directions it goes in, this film is really pretty focused.

The thrust of the story is pretty basic. A number of years ago, a space probe broke up over Mexico. Not too long afterwards, gigantic alien creatures began stomping around Mexico, and I do mean gigantic. These creatures now rule roughly the northern 2/3 of Mexico in an area called the “Infected Zone,” and the United States has built a huge wall to keep them from crossing the Rio Grande.

In Mexico, Samantha Wynden (Whitney Able), the daughter of a publishing magnate, is hiding out. It seems that she is having second thoughts about her engagement. But Mexico is a dangerous place to be. While the creatures tend to stay within the Infected Zone, they don’t always, and thousands of Mexican citizens are killed every year. It’s time for Sam to go home, but even travel is difficult, and not leaving in time will force her to stay in Mexico for another six months. That may not sound so bad, but Mexico, thanks to the creatures, is essentially a warzone.

Sent to bring her back is Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy), a photojournalist who works for Sam’s father. He’s in Mexico to get pictures of the giant creatures and the destruction they cause. But now he has to babysit Sam back to the U.S., or at least get her on a plane or a boat that will take her there. And, of course, if the journey to the coast was an easy one, we wouldn’t have a movie. Eventually, completely out of other options, the two are forced to attempt to enter the U.S. by passing through the Infected Zone, a sort of massive-alien-filled El Norte.

This sounds like an action movie, doesn’t it? If Edwards had had a larger budget, it probably would have been one. Alas, that simply wasn’t the case. Edwards was forced to work within the constraints of the limited budget he had, a budget that forced him to essentially film actual scenes with unknowing passersby filling in as extras. So what we get instead of gun battles against 60-foot-high tentacle beasts out of a Lovecraftian dream is an indie romance between Sam and Andrew.

This was unexpected. It’s also something of a disappointment.

I recently had a conversation with Kai Parker over at Man, I Love Films about one of the reasons he’s not a fan of many films before about 1980. One of the reasons he cited is that couples seem to fall in love instantly in older movies without any justification of it. I see that, but I’d hold this film up to Kai as an example of modern films not stepping away from that old model in the least. Sam may well be engaged to someone back in the States and Andrew has a son, but these two are immediately attracted to each other. In fact, the reason they are forced to go through the Infected Zone is because Andrew is robbed of their passports, which happens when Sam has a temper tantrum after seeing him with another woman. And this is after one day together. Take that, Kai.

I won’t say that Monsters isn’t an interesting or entertaining movie, because it is both of these things. And, despite it’s apparent multiple personalities, it seems to know what it wants to be. However, it comes in vastly different trappings from the standard indie romance film, which is what it is in its heart. It may well also be a subtle indictment on American immigration policy, but that’s a stretch for a film from a British filmmaker.

More or less, this is my problem with the film. I wanted this to be a film about fighting these awesome creatures, and while there are some tense moments and some decent effects for this low budget, it would be a much more interesting film as well as a much more entertaining one if it had been more about the critters and less about romance blooming between two people thrust into a difficult situation with each other. Even those times it feels like we’re finally going to see one of the aliens, we generally instead have a scene that develops our two principal characters instead. Normally, I’m all for character development instead of explosions, but when the film ostensibly deals with giant land-based octopus beasts, the opposite is true.

This is worth watching to see a film that capitalizes brilliantly on its small budget, but there are more interesting and entertaining places this film could have gone.

Why to watch Monsters: Low budget science fiction that looks more expensive than it is.
Why not to watch: It could have gone more interesting places.

Suicide is Painless

Film: M*A*S*H
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I wasn’t that conscious of movies when I was two or three years old, which is how old I was when M*A*S*H was released. As a kid, the most relevant thing with that name was the television show, the one that ran for three times longer than the war upon which it was based. I spent a lot of evenings watching the show, and as I got older and the show was eventually retired, I watched a lot of reruns. What that means is that I have a particular view of M*A*S*H, and it’s a view that doesn’t really jibe with the film.

This isn’t to say that the film isn’t great, though, because it is. It’s a very unusual film, though, for a number of reasons. It’s also very much an Altman film in that the cast is freakin’ huge and there are tons of characters to keep track of during the course of the film. However, as a person who is so familiar with the television versions of many of these characters, it’s impossible for me to tell if the film is difficult to follow. I know almost all of the main characters, so in a real sense, I know what to expect of them.

Essentially, we have a group of doctors in a mobile Army surgical hospital (hence the initials) a few miles from the front in Korea. They patch up soldiers when they come in wounded, and otherwise spend their time trying to forget that they are in Korea. They drink, play pranks on each other, and chase nurses with reckless abandon.

The doctors that we become acquainted with first are Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and Duke Forrest (Tom Skerrit, almost unrecognizable without the trademark mustache). They are the new surgeons at the 4077th hospital, and the minute they arrive, they begin to turn the camp upside down, getting things running the way they like them. This task is made easier because their commander, Henry Blake (Roger Bowen), is a pushover. It’s made more difficult because their bunkmate, Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), is a by-the-book officer and deeply religious. Things are compounded in both directions with the arrival of Trapper John McIntyre (Elliott Gould), who sides with our degenerate doctor heroes, and a new head nurse named “Hot Lips” O’Houlihan (Sally Kellerman).

Essentially, M*A*S*H is completely without a plot. There are events that happen, and we see the camp personnel deal with these issues. We deal with the issues of the doctors not being up to military muster, with the fact that the camp dentist, “Painless” Waldowski (immediately recognizable character actor John Schuck) wants to commit suicide because he believes he has turned gay, and a surprise trip for Trapper and Hawkeye to Japan. Everything eventually culminates in a football game with another military outfit, complemented on the 4077th’s side with a ringer—an ex-professional football player-turned-neurosurgeon named Oliver “Spearchucker” Jones (Fred Williamson), given that nickname not because of his skin color, but because he used to throw the javelin.

M*A*S*H isn’t about a story, or getting through a particular plot or series of events. Instead, it’s about surviving the insanity of war, and the irony of being a medical doctor in a place of death and destruction. In fact, one of the reasons that there is so much humor in the film is because it is a natural contrast to the pain and misery of war. The other reason is that extreme situations like war often bring this sort of behavior and attitude out in the people trapped in the middle of it. We laugh so that we are not sickened by it. This is also why a lot of the humor here is so dark and so cruel. That’s the only reason for the broadcasting of Frank’s tryst with Hot Lips, and why the shower is rigged to collapse when Hot Lips enters it.

The film also works because the operating room scenes are both brutal and banal. Men are on the table with horrible wounds, and while we don’t specifically see any body parts or grue (or at least not too much), there’s an ocean of blood, and the doctors and nurses are up to their elbows in it. At the same time, the doctors and nurses discuss average, everyday topics, almost as if they are fixing toasters.

Altman is a difficult director for me to get behind, often because there is so much to pay attention to in his films. There are often so many characters that it can be tough to keep everyone straight. M*A*S*H does not suffer from this though, although that may only be because I know these characters so well. This is a hell of a film, and one that has aged surprisingly well, a fact that may be due to the influence of television as well.

Why to watch M*A*S*H: It spawned a true American cultural landmark.
Why not to watch: There really isn’t much of a plot.

Manson Family Circus

Film: Last Chants for a Slow Dance
Format: VHS from Eastern Illinois University Library through interlibrary loan on big ol’ television.

Sometimes, we are presented with something that we simply can’t really understand. Last Chants for a Slow Dance is sort of like that. It’s an ultra-indie film, made on a budget of about $2,000 (albeit 1977 dollars, but still), and it looks like it. In fact, it looks quite a bit like home movies of the Manson Family, or the formative years of Ted Bundy.

Tom (Tom Blair) is a drifter who appears to spend most of his time driving around Montana in his truck, allegedly looking for work. Back home he has a wife and two boys, and soon discovers that he has another child on the way. He claims to love his wife Darlene (Jessica St. John), but is unfaithful every chance he gets. He has no money, but has enough for gas to drive around and to hang out in bars and pick up women. He laughs almost constantly, like a nervous habit. Oh, and he’s also a stone-cold murderer who loots the bodies of those he slays, which might explain where his money comes from after all.

There isn’t a massive amount of narrative in this film. Generally, when we get a film that is lacking a basic plot and even a rudimentary story structure, it means that what’s left is a character study. I’m not sure this qualifies as a character study, either. It is, more or less, a slice of time out of this character’s life. We see him driving, we see him at home interacting with Darlene, we see him picking up women in bars and having sex with them, and ultimately, we see him pull over for a car in trouble and eventually shoot the driver and walk away smiling and singing.

Ostensibly, this film was based on Gary Gilmore, and I have no idea how accurate it is or how much came from the Gilmore case and how much came from writer/producer/director Jost. There is a chilling quality to it, though, a sense of a man simply “finding work” in a way that most of us would find repugnant. Tom doesn’t kill for pleasure or sport, but because he needs money. Once he has killed a victim, he’s not erotically satisfied or mentally sated. Instead, there is a sense of satisfaction, of having completed another job.

In that respect, Last Chants for a Slow Dance seems to presage a number of films. There is in some part a feeling of both Natural Born Killers and the Anton Chigurh character from No Country for Old Men in Tom’s almost nonchalance about murdering an innocent individual on the side of the road. For Tom, there is only the necessary goal of collecting enough money to keep going. Money in hand, he’s off to hunt women for sex and bars for alcohol until the cash runs out again and the cycle will repeat. He is, in a real sense, a predator of humans.

It’s difficult to tell if the film essentially looks like home movies (to the point of having sound unsynched with the visuals for the first few minutes) because Jost was going for that sort of look or because he simply couldn’t afford to do anything better. Certainly there is a homemade quality to the film, a sense of the amateur auteur. Jost frequently uses very long takes, planting his camera and simply filming what is in front of him for several minutes at a time. Often, particular scenes go on for much longer than it seems possible or advisable. But this works; it lulls the viewer initially into a sense of ease. At the end, the same lengthy takes of driving or of the roadside provide an opportunity to contemplate what has happened and what may happen next.

In short, this is a difficult film to take in. It is oddly powerful and strange, amateur without being amateurish. I am now very curious to see the other two films in what is loosely known as the Tom Blair Trilogy, but that is a project for another day.

(Note: While more films will be added next year and presumably every year, at this moment, I've hit the halfway point. 545 down, 544 to go.)

Why to watch Last Chants for a Slow Dance: The purest definition of indie ever made.
Why not to watch: Slight narrative and long takes of not much happening.