Hard to believe that the United States did cultural commentary and intelligent satire as good as anywhere around the world when this was made. What happened? Maybe it became obsessed by the veneer thin pursuits of Celebrity and fame. The woman breast feeding the rather large infant went on to marry Frank Zappa who also appears in this documentary in a separate scene.
Robert Carl Cohen (b.1930), who had previously made Inside Red China (1957), Inside East Germany (1959), Committee on Un-American Activities (1962), and Inside Castro's Cuba (1963),[5] was producer, director, photographer and editor of the film. The music director was Mike Curb, and the soundtrack featured songs by Davie Allan and the Arrows, and others.[3]
The film was promoted as "starring Jayne Mansfield", who had recently died, even though she only appears in it very fleetingly. It was first shown at the Mannheim Film Festival in 1967, and was then scheduled to be shown at the Avignon Festival. However, the French government banned it from being shown, stating:[6]
"This film, in the opinion of certain experts of the Commission [of Control], presents an apology for a certain number of perversities, including drugs and homosexuality, and constitutes a danger to the mental health of the public by its visual aggressivity and the psychology of its editing. The Commission proposes, therefore, its total interdiction."
The ban was later lifted. In 1978, when Mike Curb was running for election as lieutenant governor of California, his opponent, the incumbent Mervyn M. Dymally, claimed that the film was "pornographic" and that Curb "sang falsetto in a bath tub scene with two lesbians." Curb at first denied singing in the film, but then admitted it.[7] He won the election.
The film was later described as a "cult classic... [which] captures the underside of Hollywood by documenting a moment in time... when an inquisitive trust in the unknown was paramount, hope for the future was tangible and life was worth living on the fringe."[4] A re-edited and expanded "director's cut" version was premiered at the Moondance Film Festival on 10 June 2006.[4]
Double Indemnity is kind of like Dostoevsky's Crime & Punishment set on Hollywood Boulevards with insurance payouts. For me Jean Heather playing Lola Dietrichson is the movie candy. Very cute. There's a little bit of synchronicity with Bhowani Junction as trains play a major part in the movie.
If you have any black and white movies you recommend very highly leave a comment below. I'll download it and review it.
It gave me a little kick that the essence of the movie is this opening scene snapped above and the deleted scene embedded below those that is now available on the DVD but wasn't included in the original 1973 (important year that one) movie. The enemy is all illusion and that's so true and relevant it's nice that the video fell on the right moment as I flipped through it, and that the relevant clip came to light straight after.
Bruce Lee was so much more than an martial artist and for my money acts better than anyone else in the movie though there are some shockers in the movie. The download was excellent quality and I really loved the Hong Kong scenes. I miss Hong Kong a lot but it's never taken good care of me for one reason and another.
I haven't watched this for a decade or two but did last night and it's still an exquisite masterpiece. It's a tale about patriarchy but is flawlessly filmed and so tightly written it barely needs any props except for red lanterns. Watch it if you've never seen it. A classic.
I don't make a habit of watching ordeal cinema but this (Palme d'Or Winner) Romanian movie is the toughest film I've watched since Irreversible. I could only watch it in two halves because of the sheer exhaustion of being so tense at watching the very simple plot unfold. Not my idea of entertainment but easily the kind of cinema that shakes me out of my complacency that it is losing it's power as an art form. Watch this and you wont think films are just make believe.
While looking for a Youtube trailer I discovered the full length film with Thai subtitles. Go ahead. Take a drink.
Very quickly the protagonists in this movie become quite annoying and I found myself siding with the judge and the daughter who is completely blameless and suffers the most. However this story's magic lies in it's ability to convey ambiguity and nuance. There isn't a single mistake that all parties don't make that I haven't made. That includes the couple above and the slightly over Islamic under educated couple who become embroiled in the lives of the more educated and upwardly mobile ones.
This is a move about everybody losing unless key insights are learned from mistakes made and in that sense is as fine an introduction to Iranian metropolitan life as a person could wish for. It won an Oscar for best foreign film of 2012.
I can feel a little Japanese film season blending in with my 'classics I've managed to miss' period I'm going through. I was recommended Tampopo by Tim over at Cultural Snow. It's almost a Japanese slapstick movie with lots of comedic and random story digressions that are irrelevant to the central plot while not harming the overall movie. It's very funny in places and rarely fails to charm. Above I've posted one of the more drole pieces, and below is the oyster catcher scene which had me choking on my Sriracha sauce. It is for my money barely legal Japanese Adult Video (JAV) in the making as he eats the oyster from her hand (I'm sure there's no metaphor intended).
She's either eight or eighteen depending on the camera angle. The Japanese are outrageous that way. Once I had an unpleasant Japanese boss who allowed me to send an email from his notebook in Tokyo as my adaptor wasn't working. As I typed in a URL there was all sorts of school girl stuff in the drop down list. So when he fired me after a magnificent meeting in Shanghai where I was on shamefully top form, I sent him an email saying I was quite broad minded but the advertising community might have a few problems with this kind of content. It was naughty of me because I didn't know all this school girl stuff is pretty normal for lots of Japanese men but blimey they push it to the edge don't they?
I purposefully chose dialogue incongruous with the cinematography above because that's a feeling I often get with Ozu's movies, or doing business with the Japanese. Ozu's films are tender pieces and sensitive experiences to watch. They're atypical of my taste but despite the slow paced, violin laced narrative there's a lot to be learned about Japanese life from them.
Historically they're set in post war Japan which though not mentioned obtusely has cinematic gestures now and again. There's the collision of old and new society, the ease with drinking tea on the floor or eating cake at the table. It was a country in swift transition and one that did a tremendous job of coming back from the abyss despite the unambiguous victory and immediate attempts of cultural colonisation by the U.S army.
Even today not many Americans know that Pearl Harbour was provoked and set up to bring the U.S. into the war without being seen to precipitate the action. There's much about the Japanese that can be frustrating but they've managed to keep their essence as a culture in spite of ultimately being on the recipient end of the only atomic attacks any country has received. They're an unusually hermetically sealed race in many respects with most Japanese having no contact with outside cultures apart from vacations. The rest of the year it's pure or 99% Japanese contact especially outside Tokyo.
Ozu shoots his movies at ground floor level as if sitting on a tatami mat. The camera is fixed and rarely pans with typically long scenes of dialogue interspersed with silence. The father daughter relationship is revisited in this film from the previous movie Tokyo Story in which Norika's mother passes away after the family vacation. It's a strange kind of framework with old and new world's merging, and in this movie a tension over each party wishing to do the best for each other when in fact they are both happier with each other. When I listen to Noriko talk, I'd suggest his daughter is uninterested in men and likely more interested in women but unable to explore or live her sexual preference. This makes the movie even more melancholic but it's well choreographed punctuated-misery in that stoic Japanese and honourable way. It's about sacrifice I guess.
When I watch Ozu movies I see hundreds of centuries including one from the future condensed into a couple of hours. The tradition, the healing of post war Japan, the clash of traditional attire with the Westernisation of dress, the hints at Japanese futurism and a pragmatism mixed with respect for delicate but pointed ways of doing everything from formal introductions to stating one's Saki limit in advance. They make me sad and they make me admire the Japanese at the same time. I think the world may have been given a more elegant kind of brutality to live in had the atom not been split and the vulgarity of overwhelming fire power dominated the rest of the century. I think nature would have been respected so much more, and that corporatism wouldn't be the unmuzzled rabid dog it is today. I doubt the Chinese would agree with me but then Communism was an experiment they suffered under considerably more than the rape of Nanking and nobody talks about that too much in the People's Republic.
This is the best portrait of the CIA documentary period. It would be easy tear into William Colby on a number of points but I found I liked some of his coldness and discipline. So I'll just leave one flower on the grave. When Colby was fired as director of CIA, more for symbolic purging reasons than any error on his part, he is filmed expressing a wish that an outsider next got the job. That man was George H.W. Bush and not even Director of CIA, William Colby was aware that George Bush had been on the books for so long he was instrumental in the murder of JFK. That's how deep the rabbit hole goes. Colby was just a clean face while the CIA needed it during the Church committee hearings.
It's an amazing documentary, absolutely stuffed with that Yale clique of secret society lizards who used the CIA and the Whitehouse to run the drug business with people like Colby unaware of it's meta purpose. If you pay attention closely you've got an Oval office audio recording of Averell Harriman pretending to be neutral while actually stitching JFK up with bad advice that the US puppet leader Diem in Vietnam needed taking down with a coup. One that Harriman was managing through his buddy Henry Cabot Lodge Jr the new ambassador in Vietnam. Colby is silent after indicating the pro and anti coup forces are evenly matched. Either he was too political to speak up for the country or just letting power do it's thing. Nobody will ever know. Nobody really knew him including his wife who has much that is likeable about her and much that is inconsistent. Hat's off to Cobly's son for making one of the most clearly framed portraits of an intelligence officer on film. Watch this documentary. You'll learn a lot.
Here's a Vanity Fair article:
On September 11, Carl Colby, a documentary filmmaker and son of the late C.I.A. director William Colby, was in Los Angeles watching the Twin Towers smolder on CNN. He was startled to hear former Secretary of State James Baker say that he believed the unprecedented attack could be directly traced to the dismantling of the C.I.A.’s ability to perform clandestine operations. It was a directive that came after William Colby testified before Senator Frank Church’s 1975 hearings on U.S. intelligence operations. In that post-Watergate era—four of the burglars had been found to have C.I.A. connections—and as Saigon was falling at the end of the Vietnam War, former C.I.A. Saigon station chief Colby’s blunt and controversial recounting of the agency’s more nefarious practices not only brought on Congressional oversight of the C.I.A. for the first time but also ensured Colby’s sacking later that year by President Ford.
In an effort to explain his father, Carl Colby’s new documentary, The Man Nobody Knew,which premieres tomorrow, offers a Who’s Who parade of former top-level C.I.A. and government officials as well as some of the most knowledgeable journalists who cover the agency—from Robert Gates and Donald Rumsfeld to Sy Hersh and David Ignatius. As they opine on the institution and William Colby’s influence, the film gives viewers a true sense of what it is to live a lie day after day and to hobnob at the highest levels in other countries—all while seeking to advance U.S. interests by whatever means necessary.
The dramatic events surrounding Colby’s career include a secret collaboration with the Vatican to defeat the Communist Party in Italy in the late 50s, his tenure as the head of the C.I.A. in the Far East during the buildup of the Vietnam war, the assassination of Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, and Colby’s stewardship of the controversial Phoenix program—a measure that sanctioned the killing of thousands of suspected Viet Cong.
Carl told me he saw his father cry only two times: when his 24-year-old sister died of anorexia and epilepsy and when Saigon fell. He remembers his father yelling at him just once: when Carl denigrated Richard Nixon during Watergate. “Never call your president a liar!” his father burst out. Yet after his sister’s death, she was never spoken of again, and several years after William Colby was fired, Carl says, he abandoned his family with little explanation, other than to once declare, “I am taking myself off the pedestal.” He bought a red sports car to tool around Washington, got a flashier wardrobe, and married a much younger woman. Even William Colby’s death, at age 76, was fittingly mysterious. One afternoon in 1996, while staying at his Rock Island, Maryland, cabin, he paddled off in his canoe, and nine days later his body was found drifting near the shore. No foul play was suspected.
At its heart, the film is a poignant probing of an aloof and distant father who clearly excelled in compartmentalization, taking his family with him as he worked undercover at U.S. embassies. Did he ever really love his five children and Carl’s loyal and elegant mother, who also appears in the film—or were they too all merely cover for a calculating super-spy?
Maureen Orth: Do you think your father committed suicide?
Carl Colby: His death was ruled an accident—a stroke or a heart attack—but I think he was done. He didn’t have a lot left to live for. And he never wanted to grow old. He always refused the “senior discount.”
One day I told him that his old college buddy had been found sitting under a bridge suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s. And my dad said, “That will never happen to me. One day you’ll hear I’m walking along a goat path on a Greek island and I just fell into the sea.”
Growing up as the child of a C.I.A. agent, did you have any idea of what he did?
I was standing on a diving board at a club in Saigon when I was about 10, and some kid came up to me and said, “Your father is a spy. He works for the C.I.A.” So that afternoon I went up to him and said, “I heard you work for the C.I.A.” He told me, “I work for the embassy. Let’s just leave it at that.” It was like a pact. That was the time of James Bond, and I thought it was pretty cool—that’s why we spent weekends with Mme. Nhu or lived next door to the prime minister in Rome.
Then in 1966, I went on an elephant hunt in Indonesia and mentioned I had met a Mr. X. My dad just looked at me. “Don’t ever mention his name again.” Then I knew; this man lived under deep cover and by never repeating his name, this was my way of helping my dad perform his mission.
How do you think your father saw his career at the C.I.A.?
He felt he was on an honorable high moral mission—to bring providence, to make the world a better place. The world to him was a venal place, and he was one of those Americans who had seen the worst and practiced the worst. He thought a lot of Americans were optimistic and naïve but he saw it all for what it was, a dirty business.
That sense of mission must have become more difficult during Vietnam.
It was as if he were a Napoleonic officer or a general in Roman times—how to suppress the rebellion in Judea.
How did your father react after he was fired?
I think he was very bitter and angry. When he talked about it, I could see his upper lip quivering just a tiny bit. In our family that was a sign. We were taught never to exhibit vulnerability. He lost the center out of his life, and then he took off his trench coat and became a completely different man. He didn’t really need to be that guy anymore. He didn’t need my mother. He didn’t need us.
Your mother appears to have been very important to his career. She certainly seems charming on film.
I think of my mother as a Catholic Barbara Stanwyck with an Ivy League education. When they met, she liked my father because he was serious—everyone she knew left to go to war. She had a fiancé who died in the war. They were people ready to make great sacrifices. My parents weren’t that needy. These were men and women who were not interested in public adoration. It’s a graceless age now with reality TV and Facebook.
What did your mother think of the C.I.A.?
She saw it as “Catholics in action.” So many people in the C.I.A. then were Catholic. Her whole relationship with the family was predicated on [my father] doing the right thing. The C.I.A. was a necessary evil that she thought was driven by a moral rectitude that reflected all of our family’s Catholic values—Catholicism is one of the world’s great warrior religions.
Your mother was described as “the most loyal C.I.A. wife ever” by infamous C.I.A. counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton.
In the earlier days it was more fun. She would say to my dad as they were going out, “Who are we tonight?” Then, as Vietnam went on, the only people in the room at their parties were other C.I.A. men and their wives. At nine p.m. the men would go into another room and close the door with their cigars and conversation. The women stayed in the dining room.
What do you think is your father’s legacy? In the film you say he had to testify before Congress 32 times in 1975.
He took on the toughest, dirtiest assignments that the White House could throw at him, and then they used him up and hung him out to dry. He was the reformer who saved the C.I.A. from itself. The price he paid was becoming the sacrificial lamb. Somebody had to take the fall. I think he took on the whole mess and was in turn consumed by the flames. It was like he purged himself of all the guilt and then walked away and re-invented himself just like phoenix rising from the ashes.
Why did you finally make this film?
It was a way to get underneath, to learn what motivated my father. Both my parents were only children. My grandfather in Minnesota traded spices and sat with Sitting Bull. My grandmother, Margaret Egan, gave my father all the love he ever needed. The fact he got married and had a family—it was like an accessory. Who was he? What was it all about? Were we just a cover? We have to live with that.
There's a great quote about this movie on IMDB. It says just because it's interesting doesn't mean it should be enjoyable. It's fair to say that in parts and in different ways The Man Who Fell To Earth isn't very good or even deliberately not good in my view like hiring flat actors so that Bowie doesn't look too bad (I've seen him do much better roles in Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and The Prestige).
Right at the end the synching is so bad they have to be ripping off a Fellini movie and it doesn't quite work in colour so I would call this movie Fellini in New Mexico as it's filmed in Roswell UFO country. Bits of it are great including photography and costumes. Even the sex scenes are too ridiculous to be offensive.
There are much better reviews than I could write at IMDB on this film so I'll just add that it was a welcome piece of art after researching hundreds of hours on CIA organized crime and global drug dealing. There's no way a film could be made today that reintroduced a Nazi war criminal with a Jewish female victim for S&M scenes of relived sex and power. There's also a splendid homo-erotic ballet scene with Nazi officers standing around, silent but intensive. Like Leni Riefenstahl the Nazi politics are ugly but the Hugo Boss SS uniforms are evil sexy. Nazism is probably the best branded ideology of the 20th century in terms of aesthetic. Like corporate Western branded ideology it hides its savage destruction in the background but what's up front looks good if like advertising you like to wear black. For this reason we should interrogate all we have and all we do. Not just look at the surface.
Like Graham Green's The Third Man it is set in post war Vienna and if anyone knows any other movies from this time and location, particularly black and white I want to see more so do let me know please.
Here's a write up:
This is quite dark. If you are seeking material that can be described as "happy" or "light", you will not find it here. I didn't know anyone in this prior to viewing. This deals with Max, the night porter of the title, who has tried to put his past in the SS behind him. One night, he spots a woman, Lucia, and they both recognize each other... she was one of the concentration camp prisoners, and the two had a specific relationship with one another. The plot is captivating. This is deliberately paced, and those who have short attention spans, and/or wish for a lot of developments in a feature are not the intended audience for this. I found the behavior of all of the characters chillingly psychologically accurate, and this definitely takes a long, hard, unflinching and uncompromising look at human nature and the mind, and not everyone is going to like the observations. The acting is excellent. All of the leads disappear into their roles. They are all well-cast, too, talent as well as physical types. I don't know if anything similar to this has truly happened, but I can imagine it, and this does pay respect to the historical events. The editing mixes flashbacks and the present effectively. This has disturbing content, including violence, sexuality that is not graphic and explicit nudity. None of it is gratuitous. The DVD has credits and posters, and while the print starts out looking shabby, it turns out to be perfectly fine. I recommend this to anyone who believes they can handle it, and is mature enough, from reading this review. 7/10
Natalie Portman in Black Swan is extraordinary. The rest of the cast are flawless too including the protagonist Vincent Cassel of Irreversible; another great movie. I've had this post in drafts for some time so I I don't feel like writing too much about it except to say I enjoyed that I found Natalie Portman's character annoying about half way and started to root for her to fall apart. I know that sounds bizarre but I like the change of emphasis from rooting for her in the first half to wishing her downfall on in the second half. She's still an extraordinary actor and one of the finest female artists of her generation. I'm impressed and her ballet skill was not negligible in this film. She excelled.
I wrote this elsewhere but it is something I wanted to touch on as I've researched the subject of remote viewing recently. The movie is a a much more provocative film than many realised. Scientific remote viewing is seen to the uninitiated as voodoo yet it is proven to be more accurate than satellite imagery. The question that lingers with the thoughtful viewer, remains why isn’t this kind of science taught at schools and universities? Well, it's because the military don’t want humans to know that we are all gifted to some extent with these powers and so if a little research is done into the subject it pushes forward other questions like what else does our scientific materialist establishment not want us to know? MKULTRA? MILABS? Human genetic experiments? Underground bases? Undersea bases and that’s six months research there into a reality that is concealed from humans by a group of people who understand fully the power of parapsychology, occultism, numbers and symbols like the Pentagon shape for example. You know, that funny building that the military designed their HQ around and which usually sits inside a Pentagram.
In plain sight it’s known as to observers on the net. It's a mind control issue as so many people can't see what the problem is. Those same people usually watch a lot of TV and commercials telling them free trade and free speech is the American way.
The obsession with the esoteric by the establishment is clearly seen by googling Washington D.C. and masonic layout. A typical symptom of mind control or permitting one's reality to be painted by corporatised media is that very same evidence of satanic occultism in the heart of the nation's capital often raising very little objection even when odd wars keep emerging in strange countries nobody really thought too much about before. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil works both ways doesn't it.
One of the anomalies of the unit that did the remote viewing and other paranormal techniques is their unusual temperament. You can see Ingo Swann on Youtube for yourself and establish that the movie would have been too disruptive if it dealt with the issues in a humourless manner.
It was a smart move to turn towards comedy (to get round the censors), but make no mistake it's a serious movie. Clooney is saying to a thoughtful public. Go ahead, dig around. This is for real and so the slavish attachment to iPhones and iPads or the delusion that CERN Large Hadron Collider is going to save the day and give people their own teleportal devices (when we're still using fossil fuel tech mobility - no chance) is merely to distract humans from knowing what is going on at the big boys level and yet still, most people think this movie is an accompaniment to popcorn.
I haven’t even touched on the topics that are so far leftfield that most people would prefer they weren’t mentioned if brought up in conversation. I'm only describing what happens in real life.
Not a lot of people remark on it but the quality of acting is a bit like sports in so much as the quality has risen to an extraordinary level over the last fifty years. So much so there's not much improvement left.
I've got a soft spot for Americans doing exceptional British characters and accents, so after watching Tim Burton'sAlice In Wonderland with Johnny Depp doing the finest Mad Hatter I can imagine, I've put him alongside Brad Pitt's gypsy character from Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels for extraordinary acting performances that leave me full of admiration and respect.
Anybody got an unusual interpretation of the story? I'm all ears.
I watched both movies earlier this week. Coincidentally both were released in 1998 and tackle similar themes of controlled populations, though the narratives are in some ways asymmetric mirrored images of each other.
In The Truman Show we have a character manipulated by an entire island acting out day to day life while the rest of the world watches his story from birth to mid marriage ennui. Actually the gullible consumers of the world are rooting for Truman (played by Jim Carey) because like him they are easily manipulated and trapped though they don't quite realise it is their attention that is for sale as the product placement medley makes clear in the first clip.
Dark City's premise is that an entire city is being energetically devoured or fed upon (in much the same way as cock fighters get off by observing the fighting of animals) by an Archontic alien/astral entity/men in black force who can freeze the entire population at a moments notice and change circumstances including a persons entire memory and personality.
Echoing that mirrored narrative I mentioned at the outset, we see that Truman's life is a never ending beautiful day wearily acted out in a simulacrum of happiness, social cohesion and veneers of harmony whereas in Dark City the themes are tackled through film noir sets, nihilism and nights that never end and a sun never rises.
It's extraordinary to me that the Truman Show eclipsed the entire constructed reality TV trend. As if Hollywood was preparing populations for TV ideas of constant surveillance entertainment and the notion of being closely observed by all pervasive and discreet technology.
Astro theologists may have picked up that it's the Sirius star light that comes crashing down in the beginning of the movie giving a brief clue to Truman and us of the observational process not forgetting its Orion's belt alignment I've been talking about from time to time.
When Donnie Darko (The Directors Cut) was rereleased the slightly Arabic looking font was removed for the usual brainwashing and paranoid issues that the US command and control corporate media have when a piece of art about a plane part hitting a building jangles the post 9/11 nerves. At least in Soviet Russia and The Peoples Republic of China the educated knew they were being lied to but most Americans are still in the dark about how manipulated they are. That is changing though. Day by day people are waking up and the hundredth monkey effect is likely to happen in 2012.
Donnie Darko is one of my top movies ever. There's so much synchromysticism in it that I found myself moved twice as much as the first time I watched the movie, and still there's much room for digging deeper into it. There's no need to go on at length about the eerie synchronicity I experienced last night as much of it is personal but it resonated heavily and struck a even deeper contextual chord for the times we are living in.
One hard to ignore example though was the Patrick Swayze character of Jim Cunningham with his creepy influence in school education. Cunningham is subsequently exposed for being a child pornography user which I saw as an analog for the recent Jerry Sandusky football coach abusing students at Penn State University and which for me isn't a scandal but merely business as usual for powerful and influential people in society as I've written about herehere and here.
Donnie Darko is the kind of film that triggers future memories and past futures. You can look at a couple of examples over here and here but I think you should bring your own experiences to the film and see what I'm trying to adumbrate. It's a personal experience. There's also an interesting and immersive website over here.
