Ariel. Aki Kaurismäki. 1988. ⚄
[twenty minutes pass]
🎔
This is such a cute movie.
[the end]
I guess this isn’t that different from Kaurismäki’s previous movies, but finally it all gels: The dead-pan humour and the pathos actually works: It all becomes really moving, and funny, and interesting.
It doesn’t hurt that he’s got the best actors he’s worked with, or that the cinematography is just… right… now, either.
Watching this is a pleasure.
Quentin Tarantino. Quentin Tarantino. 2019. ⚄
[fifteen minutes pass]
This is like… *insert standard Tarantino scene* *insert standard Tarantino scene* *insert standard Tarantino scene*.
But like everybody else, I like those standard Tarantino scenes, so it’s a lot of fun. Let’s see if this coheres into an actual movie, because sometimes these collections of Tarantino scenes don’t.
[fifteen minutes pass]
Uh oh!
SPOILERS!
Is this about Charles Manson?
Well, Tarantino snuck that up on us…
How disappointing! How dull.
[an hour passes]
I’m torn. The Sharon Tate scenes are delightful… but they’re also murder porn scenes: Since we know that she’s going to be horribly killed, we know that they’re building up her character in this movie so that when she’s finally (presumably) horribly murdered by the hippie kids, the audience is gonna be all shocked and sad.
It’s such a sophomoric attempt at audience manipulation.
Then there’s the scene with the western star, who’s… playing in what looks like the most bizarre TV pilot ever. What’s up with that?
It’s not like anything here is boring, but I’m deeply annoyed with the movie.
ANNOYED!
[the end]
*sniffle* *sniffle*
OK, this may be the greatest movie ever.
EVER!
OK, that’s not true, but I really didn’t realise that this was a Tarantino fantasia like Inglorious Basterds — not how the world was, but how it was supposed to be. It’s like the anti-Manson movie: Tarantino ridicules, skewers and deflates his whole thing, which is the opposite tack taken by, well, everybody else.
YAY TARANTINO.
I’ve never cheered anybody getting chewed up by a dog as I did in this movie.
Tarantino made it all work, in the best movie he’s made.
I probably would have enjoyed it more if I’d known how it was going to turn out, though. Which is a very strange thing.
So here it is: In this movie, Sharon Tate survives.
Flickorna. Mai Zetterling. 1968. ⚅
*gasp* This has like all my favourite actors:
This is gonna be brilliant!
[the end]
OK OK OK, the plot here is very simple: A theatre troupe puts in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata in the districts, and the play and reality meld together kinda.
But wow! This is brilliant! It’s like post-Nouvelle Vague, post-realism, post-Bergman, post-everything: It’s totally new! Amazeballs!
I was riveted to the sofa the entire time! It’s like so weird — I’ve seen nothing like it (but I mean, there are obviously parallels to French and British late-60s cinema).
It’s gorgeously shot and strangely lit: It shifts between kinda semi-natural lighting to over-exposure-lighting in a hypnotic way. (I was wondering whether Zetterling was using infrared film at one point but I think not?)
Andersson, Andersson and Lindblom are totally amazing here — it’s just one iconic shot after another.
But I mean, it’s not perfect — two thirds of the movie in, the pacing gets a bit erratic…
Let my try my hand at a translation: “The film met harsh criticism and disappeared from the Stockholm cinema after three and a half weeks. ‘Such deranged menstruations!’, Bo Strömstedt of the Express newspaper commented.”
Fuck you, Bo Strömstedt.
Fuck you.
