(April 24)

——Maitresse (1976)——

Put S&M and Criterion in the same sentence and, God bless me, I’m there. I can’t say no. I can’t look away. Because if Criterion puts it out then you know it will be perverse AND make you think.

A young hood, breaking and entering with a friend, happens upon a dungeon in a Paris apartment flat. The two of them become trapped in the room by the mistress’ dog. The hood is asked to participate in a humiliation roleplay by the mistress to get out of trouble. He does so, and aside from some initial reluctance, seems very interested in what is going on here. After they are free to go the friend leaves, but the hood stays. The two of them fall in love, but the controlled atmosphere of the dominatrix comes under attack when the two of them fight for control in the relationship. The both start living for the thrill of danger. Only in the final sequence do they find a startling way to coexist happily together, each being the dominator and the dominated.

The movie is very interesting, and quite intelligent. It’s not for the faint of heart, though. Aside from the obvious sequences of sadomasochism (one guy gets his dick nailed to a board) there is also a rather disturbing and real shot of a horse being slaughtered. Anyone in the animal rights parade might want to avoid this one. For anyone feeling more adventurous though, I think this is

(MUST SEE)

——Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)——

It’s been a while since I first saw this film. It actually held up better than I thought it would. I think I’ve probably matured a lot since that initial viewing, back in the days when seeing a movie was still a novelty and I didn’t yet like Westerns. Boy, have things changed. People aren’t kidding when they refer to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as the ultimate buddy movie. It is. No denying that. Some poorly educated intellectual schmuck might want to make arguments for the homosexual subtext in the film, but I think that they would totally be missing the whole point of the film. Yes, Butch and Sundance are unnaturally close, yes, closer than either of them ever seem to be with the sexual firecracker, Katharine Ross. She even leaves them at one point because she isn’t getting the love she needs. But Butch and Sundance have a man love that’s nothing like homosexual love. They would never think of that. There’s no Brokeback Bolivia here. Their just the bestest of buds. Two guys who truly understand each other, not actually too much alike, but two parts of the same mind. All the crazy shit they do is only because they trust completely in the other.

But enough about that. What about the movie? Everything is great about it. It’s filled with classic lines, classic moments. Like the scene where they use too much dynamite, or the Raindrops sequence, or the end. Great stuff. Newman and Redford feel like they were born to play these characters. They feel like lifelong friends. It’s great. And of course there is Conrad Hall’s amazingly beautiful cinematography. He puts all others to shame. If you’ve never seen this film, you owe it to yourself to put it in your BenFlix que.

(MUST SEE)

(April 25)

——Don’t Deliver Us from Evil (1971)——

Inspired by the same New Zealand murders covered more true to real life events in the Peter Jackson film, Heavenly Creatures, director Joel Seria takes the core idea of two schoolgirls becoming instant obsessively close friends who then commit murder and takes a different spin at it, choosing as his target the Roman Catholic church he grew up in. These girls decide to dedicate their life to Satan and doing only bad deeds, like seducing men only to draw away at the last second or by cruelly killing a man’s pet birds that he loves more than life itself just to see his reaction. While the film doesn’t exactly endorse Satanism, it also isn’t kind at all to the Catholic Church, implying that all of the congregation are sheep, the nuns are all lesbians and that the Father is a pedophile (oddly enough, Spell Check doesn’t think that is a word). The girls conduct a black mass and then terrorize the countryside before finally slipping up and killing someone. They never completely get caught though, allowing them their final act of evil, which I won’t describe here because it is such an iconic scene that it makes the whole film worth seeing. Those last moments will burn themselves into your brain. It’s not the best movie in the world, but definitely interesting.

(SEE)

——Wolf Creek (2004)——

I’m really sad that I missed the opportunity to see this film in the theaters. It came out so soon after Hostel that when I brought it up to Harry as an option for us to go see, he said that he wasn’t quite in the mood yet for more blood and gore torture movies. I, of course, had no idea what the hell he was talking about, but we went to go see something else anyway. The next week Wolf Creek was gone and I had to wait until it came out on DVD to check out this gem from Down Under.

The cool thing about this movie, which is EXTREMELY rare in a horror film, is that if the three main characters never ran into the bloodthirsty psycho that wanted them all dead, this would STILL be a really well-made road movie. An Aussie guy meets two English girls on Austrailia’s west coast and they decide to all take together a road trip to a big party on the east coast, while along the way they see the Outback and check out one of the largest meteorite craters in the world at Wolf Creek. The first half has the typical beautiful vistas, flirting and ghost stories you’ve come to expect from one of those movies. But then when their car mysteriously dies at Wolf Creek they meet a helpful stranger whose reasons for such generosity are soon to be revealed much more sinister than friendly.

Everything about this movie I thought was very well made, from the acting to the cinematography down to how all of the gruesome events take place. What is really scary about this movie is that the main characters are given ample time to escape, but as they are lost in the middle of nowhere, they have no idea where to escape to. All of this is made all the scarier by the shear fact that it was apparently based on a real backpack killer, who killed nine in the Outback, making him one of Australia’s most notorious serial killers. I think for horror movie fans this one should be

(MUST SEE)

——Crooklyn (1994)——

I expected another Clockers from this Spike Lee film and was very pleasantly surprised to find a beautiful family picture in its place. I had no idea going into it, but I ended up loving this movie. It’s about the women in a poor black family in 1970’s Brooklyn. Alfre Woodard is just fantastic as the mother holding a family of five boys and a girl together with only her teaching job to support them all, as her husband (Delroy Lindo), a musician, is trying to make his own music his own way, but in the meantime is making no money. The kids are crazy, but in the way you know big families of siblings to be. They fight constantly, but they’re close. The story takes its perspective from the lone little girl, trying to keep up with her brothers and be a good woman at the same time, torn between two worlds.

The film is really no more than a series of anecdotes, but they are wonderful ones, and you can’t help get sucked into the film, enraptured by what is going on and how simple it all seems. What a beautiful film. There was only one thing I didn’t like about it. Towards the end of the film the little girl is sent off to her wealthy aunt’s house in the suburbs for the summer because they can’t afford to keep her home. To show how different the two worlds are, Spike squishes the picture distorting the image. This goes on for the whole sequence. At first I thought something was wrong with my DVD, that suddenly it lost its anamorphic transfer until I realized that if that were true the image would stretch in the opposite direction. It was extremely distracting and very annoying. Thanks a lot Spike.

It also had one of my most favorite shots ever, though, to make up for that snafu. In one part of the film, two kids (one of them played by Spike) sniff some glue and then go walking/floating down the street. To show how high they are, the camera pans with them down the street, except that they are upside down and floating while everything else is right side up. Simple but super funny. Aside from that one little image snafu, this movie is actually for me a

(DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH)

(April 28)

——Match Point (2005)——

I’ve already reviewed this (February 11). I still love it, and it looks great on DVD. What more needs to be said about this return to form for Woody Allen? See it! I’m already insanely late writing up these reviews, so I’ll leave it at that hardy recommendation.

(MUST SEE)

——California Split (1974)——

California Split is an odd little Robert Altman movie. Parts of it are very funny, while often dipping into the more serious. There is plenty of Altman’s trademark overlapping dialogue. But it is also confounding picture. Like the ending. You either make peace with the movie or end up not liking it. I did like it though. I liked its little quirks.

George Segal and Elliott Gould are two hopeless chronic gamblers who manage to meet each other in a poker hall and immediately become friends, noticing a common bond between the two. They both love to gamble. On anything. On everything. They love gambling. Gould is the crazier of the two. One of the great moments of the film involves him crashing Segal’s apartment in a sombrero after pulling a disappearing act on Segal, making a spontaneous gambling trip to Mexico. Gould seems more at piece with his gambling, more anything goes. He gets robbed twice after winning big and doesn’t seem overly upset about the whole thing. On the other hand, Segal has gotten himself in debt big-time. He needs a run of good luck, desperately. He convinces Gould to pool all of their money to make one giant run at Reno.

Both actors are fantastic. You want to like these two misfits. The plotting of the film is pretty random, but also makes for lots of good scenarios. Like the fact that Gould lives with two prostitutes, but nothing is ever much made of that fact. They even scare off one of the girls weird tricks so that they can take the two of them out. Not for all tastes, but I think most will like this.

(SEE)

(April 29)

——Stalag 17 (1952)——

While being the inspiration for Hogan’s Heroes, Billy Wilder’s take on camp life in a German POW camp during World War II is decidedly darker than its sitcom counterpart. After two prisoners are killed during an escape attempt it becomes obvious to the members of Stalag 17 that someone is tipping off the Germans about their secret activities. All eyes go to Sergeant J.J. Sefton, played coolly by William Holden, the man who can get, and has, everything and also cares for no one or nothing other than himself. To get all of these goodies he is frequently seen trading with the Nazis, so surely he must be the traitor…

But of course he isn’t. Who would be that stupid? Thus Sefton faces the persecution of his fellow allies, all while trying to figure out a way to prove his innocence. While it is pretty obvious he isn’t the one tipping off the Germans, the great mystery is of who really is the mole. Anyone and everyone could be suspect. I didn’t guess it until the very end. Part of the reason for this is Wilder’s excellent characterizations of the multiple characters. Unlike some films with giant casts where most of the actors tend to blend right in with the other ones, or worse, they become gross caricatures instead of real people, Wilder manages to pull out all the stops in making these characters funny and surreal without overplaying his hand. Like most of Wilder’s films, this one is

(MUST SEE)

——Flirting (1991)——

As any reader of this column knows, I love blood, guts and sex in my movies. I make no apologies for that. What those readers who don’t know me that well probably don’t realize is that I’m also a big softy at heart. I like my chick flicks just as much as my Miike movies, it’s just that I have a slightly bigger prejudice towards chick flicks because so many of them just suck. No such fate for Flirting, however, an obscure Australian coming of age film I found by recommendation by a video store clerk on one of the many DVD blogs I regularly visit, starring a very young Thandie Newton and Nicole Kidman.

The film is about the inhabitants of two bordering schools facing each other but separated by a lake in 1960’s Australia. On the boy’s side is our protagonist, an intelligent, bookish young man with a slight stutter who is often picked on but doesn’t care, as he realizes that the other dimwitted boys need someone to pick on, and why not it be him since he doesn’t mind all that much? His life at the school is rather mundane until he meets a new arrival on the girls’ side, an Ugandan student played by Thandie Newton. As soon as she arrives she faces much of the same adolescent torture as her male counterpart because she is different, which probably helps explain why the two of them get along with each other so quickly. The queen bitch is played by Nicole Kidman, but in an odd turn of events breaking all cliches and conventions, she turns out to be not really all that much of a bitch after all.

For those sick of the same old teenage Hollywood garbage who are looking for something different, this movie will come as a breath of fresh air, dealing with real issues in a realistic way while keeping the surreal humor of adolescence intact. I’d never heard of it before, but now I’d recommend it to anyone.

(SEE)

(April 30)

——The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)——

The first thought that comes to any cinephile that watches this movie directed by Tommy Lee Jones are the similarities between this film and Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. I started thinking about an entirely different source all together in the latter sections of the movie, though. My mind was brought back to Dante’s Purgatory. There is a certain theme in here of the bad (not evil) man first being punished for his sins, but then through his sufferings and labors finally being able to ask for forgiveness so as to make up for his past deeds.

The film, oddly, is about a man named Melquiades Estrada who gets buried three times after being killed. Melquiades is an illegal immigrant that came to the United States to be a cowboy so as to send money back to his family back home. The other key characters are Tommy Lee Jones’, as the cowboy/best friend of Melquiades, and Barry Pepper’s character, who is a Border Patrol guard who isn’t clued into his high school sweetheart wife’s needs and doesn’t seem to understand why it isn’t right to beat on the illegal immigrants they find trying to make it over the border. He isn’t an especially bad person, just a deeply flawed one. He accidentally kills Melquiades though, and when Jones finds out about it he kidnaps Pepper and takes him on a gruesome pilgrims’ trek through the wilderness of the Southern border to bury Melquiades back at his home.

The first half of the film has a fractured narrative that can be slightly confusing at times as you try to restructure the chronology of the story in your mind, but ultimately I think it works because it helps us identify with the human side of Melquiades while at the same time keeping the macabre aspect of the film always at the back of the audiences’ mind. It helps us see both cause and effect at the same time, which grounds the story in a way. Once Jones discovers the identity of the killer the narrative straightens out, but that’s when things just get really weird. It is quite the surreal experience, watching the latter half of the film in the theater. Is Jones’ character crazy, or is he just trying to prove a point? I started thinking of him as a more sadistic Virgil, leading his Dante through the trials of Purgatory until he finally accepts that which he has done and asks forgiveness. A very interesting film.

(SEE)