——Through a Glass Darkly——

(A)

This 1961 Ingmar Bergman film is quite an amazing and beautiful film, shot perfectly with rich black and white compositions shot with natural lighting and using excellent use of depth of field. In it a small family is vacationing on a remote island. Karin, the main character, is a woman suffering from a mental disease that is slowly destroying her mind and making her crazy. In her fits she tries to find god in an empty room in the house where the decorative wallpaper is rotting and pealing off the walls, very easily standing in as a metaphor for her slowly unraveling mind. Her husband is there taking care of her, while her father, an emotionally distant hack writer, is writing about her mental decay in his diary in order to use it for his next book. His pillaging of ideas from his family is tearing him up inside, which is why he is constantly absent from the family on vacation in other countries, and he can bearly live with himself for what he is now doing with Karin. He’s become a monster feeding off the histories of other in order to sustain his writing career. Last in the family is the brother of Karin who is at the confused teenager stage of life who starts to develop an odd incest-like relationship with his sister when she starts to lose it, becoming much more sensual. The family’s relationship begins to disintegrate like Karin’s psyche, which is probing for god to open a door in the wall of the empty room so that she can join him. But when she does see the door open, all that is behind it is a spider, which causes her to flip out and they end up sending her to a mental institution. The film is a search for god and his intangible presence, and is done quite well. It has the intimacy of a stage performance, and yet the visual brilliance of a master at the top of his craft. The cinematography is wonderful, and Criterion has gone above and beyond the call of duty to bring us such a beautiful print.

——Rambo: First Blood Part II——

(C+)

This film is probably the most unintentionally hilarious film ever made. There is this scene where out of nowhere Rambo falls in love with this Vietnamese girl he just met (although she’s really Hawaiian, and this was really filmed in Mexico not Vietnam, and most of the cast looks either Mexican or Filipino, but who notices things like that, right?) they kiss (really, like in the middle of nowhere Stallone decides there needs to be a love story) and immediately afterwards she gets shot like twenty times. Now he’s cradling her in his arms while she says her last (unintentionally hilarious) words. It’s hilarious. What would make it more hilarious? Maybe if he when she died he looked up into the sky and screamed “NOOOOOOO!”? (Well actually, according to the documentary there was such a scene in the film, which they cut after test audiences couldn’t stop laughing after watching it.) This film is so all over the place that it only gets funnier and funnier as you go along. The Vietnamese look like World War II Japanese half the time (God knows why) the Russians (yes there are Russians, and lots of them) fly around in Army surplus Bell helicopters, and the US Army takes its orders from a bureaucrat and a computer. Rambo must blow up every house in Vietnam, it’s crazy. The best scene has to be the one where he has the standoff with the Vietnamese officer. The officer has two guns, Rambo has just a bow. The officer unloads about a hundred rounds at Rambo, but not a since one hits. Meanwhile Rambo takes like two hours to string up his bow, while this guy just unloads everything he’s got on him. Finally Rambo shoots a rocket tipped arrow at the officer and he blows up into a million pieces. That sort of stuff is just priceless. Rambo can materialize out of the forest and kill your ass, so look out. Also, with such lines as: “Sir, do we get to win this time?” and his teary eyed speech “I want what they want: for our country to love us as much as we love it, that’s what I want,” how could you not love this pro-POW American fighting soldier, anti-just about everyone else film?