David Holzman's Diary (1967)

Today's film is David Holzman's Diary.  This film is of great historical significance because it features the world's first vlogger.

David wants to make a video diary about his life.  He has lots of neat equipment: a videocamera, sound recorder, and microphone, all adding up to 19 pounds he carries around everywhere.  This is very interesting because we can see how far technology has come.  I can film myself on my iPod touch, which has a much better camera and weighs less than a pound.

The problem is that David has nothing to say.  He wants to film himself and his girlfriend, but she is having none of that.  He disrespects her wishes and films her asleep, so she leaves.  So now he's all alone.  Lots of people have vlogs now.  They can be about anything.  It can be about someone's interesting life, a journey across the country, raising kids, or hobbies.  But David's blog is literally about nothing.  In the end, he realizes this and gets frustrated with himself.  He doesn't properly lock up his equipment and they get stolen while he is out of town.  So that's the end of the movie.

This movie may seem like a documentary, but it's actually a film with a script. The people are just actors.  It looks realistic so I will give it a 6/10.

Ben-Hur (1959)

Today's film is Ben-Hur.  This film had a huge budget, and they used every bit of it.  Authentic costumes, props, thousands of extras, no expense was spared and that makes one awesome movie. However, some of the editing cuts were pretty bad, but then again it was made in the '50s.

Judah Ben-Hur (played by Charlton Heston) is a Judean prince whose best friend is a Roman, Messala.  Messala (played by Stephan Boyd) is power hungry, and when an important Roman figure is killed by Ben-Hur's poorly maintained roof, he uses this to his advantage.  Instead of forgiving him, he makes an example out of him and sends him off into slavery, and also imprisons his mother and sister.

Ben-Hur spends the next three years as a galley slave, rowing the Roman boats.  He catches the attention of a Roman Consul, Quintus Arrius, and later saves his life when the boat sinks.  Arrius is so grateful that he petitions for his freedom and later adopts him as his son and teaches him how to drive chariots.  However, Ben-Hur is still consumed by his quest for revenge against Messala and he returns to his hometown.

Now here comes the part we've all been waiting for: the chariot race.  Ben-Hur meets a sheik that owns beautiful white horses and asks him to run the big race.  Once he finds out Messala is running too, he agrees.  Because the race is so dangerous, either one could die while doing it.  So now he can kill Messala in a semi-legal way, which somehow makes it better.  Messala may be an ass, but he hasn't killed anyone.  Meanwhile, Ben-Hur killed two guards while escaping prison, and then more people while the boat was sinking.

The chariot race scene itself had 15,000 extras.  The little town my husband lived in had 6,000 people living it it.  Ok?  So 6000 people in town and then over twice as many were in one scene in a movie, that's how big this scene was.  That's amazing.  The race was exciting, and Messala pulled some straight James Bond shit with his sharp wheels.  However, Ben-Hur won, which is not surprising because it is his movie.  Messala is dying from his injuries but Ben-Hur doesn't even care.  Was killing him really worth it?  Did it really change anything?

Meanwhile, he finds out that his imprisoned mother and sister contracted leprosy.  A remedy wasn't available back then.  Fun fact: leprosy takes about 3-5 years before symptoms appear.  They were imprisoned for 3 years, meaning they could have caught it long before they were imprisoned.  So, Ben-Hur killed the bad guy and will marry his slave's hot daughter (who is a terrible actress and took away from the scenes) but what will happen to his mother and sister?

One of my lit teachers told us about "deus ex machina" - basically, the writer can't end the story (like the plot has come to a standstill or they face an impossible problem) so something unexpected happens to solve the problem almost by magic.  It comes from Greek theater where a god would appear at the end to fix everything.  Well, this is how they solved the leprosy problem - Jesus, who by now has had a few cameos, uses his +5 god magic to heal them.  Wow.  Did not see that coming.  So the moral of the story is, if one of your friends betrays you, make sure you kill enough people to survive, and kill him too, then Jesus will heal your family.  Cause that's what happened.

Since so much effort was put into this movie, it really is a spectacle.  I will give it an 8/10.

Superfly (1972)

Today's film is Superfly.  It makes me sad that I missed out on wearing '70s clothes.  Our main character, Priest, is tired of his drug selling lifestyle and decides to make one big score and retire.  He has $300,000 dollars to spend and wants to turn it into $1 million before he cashes out.

Problem is, almost everyone's against him.  The mob, the corrupt drug dealing cops, his former mentor, and his partner/best friend.  Everyone is just using him.  It's easy to see why he wants to escape his life.  He can rely on the women in his life to help him out.  There is one sexy scene but it is too unbelievable as they don't make bathtubs that big.

Besides the photo montage of everyone using drugs, the overall film is unbiased about drug use.  Most films preach about how bad drugs are, but this film shows it as everyone's reality.  Priest's partner tells him if he stops selling dope, then the only thing he can do is be a pimp.  Like those are his only two options in life.  Once Priest escapes with his money, then no one will be able to tell him what he can or can't do.  He has a clever way to escape and keep his money safe from the crooked cops, and it works.  It is overall a straightforward film, and I enjoyed it, especially the music.  I will give this film a 6/10.

Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Today's film is Five Easy Pieces.  Jack Nicholson does a great job in this film.  He plays Bobby, who grew up in high society and was groomed to be a concert pianist, but abandoned it all to live a simple life working on the oil fields.

Bobby is dating Rayette, a not too bright waitress.  His friend, Elton, has a toddler and tries to convince Bobby that babies are great.  He tells him that Rayette is pregnant.  Bobby never asks her about it, nor does she ever tell him herself, so the fact of whether or not she really is pregnant is unknown or just plain ignored.

Bobby makes an impromptu stop at his sister's studio where she is recording piano music.  His sister tells him that their father has suffered from a series of strokes and may not recover.  Even though he doesn't want to, he decides to visit him for the last time.

He takes Rayette with him, but dumps her off at a motel before he reaches his parent's island.\ But, after a while, she runs out of money and goes to the island to meet him and his family, something he is quite upset with.  To him, she's simple and irritating (which is highlighted by the constant whiny female country music), and above all, asks for ketchup for a nice meal. Disgusting, I'd want to smack her too.  Later, there's a gathering of semi-intellectuals droning on and on, while Rayette demands to watch TV instead.  Equally uncomfortable by both his family and her, he just wants to leave.

Bobby tries to speak with his father, but it's too difficult as he is unresponsive.  He falls in love with Catherine, a woman practicing music at his house, but that's only because she's the opposite of him and opposites attract.  She has life goals and works hard to achieve them while he just drifts along.  She asks him to play the piano and he chooses to play the simplest song he knows.  He could be something but chooses not to.  Getting nowhere with her and not being able to talk to his dad, he leaves.

While leaving, Bobby and Rayette stop at a gas station.  He hands her his wallet while she goes inside.  He hops into a logging truck and tells the driver he lost everything in a fire.  The driver offers him and jacket and tells him it will be very cold where they're going.  I think they might be going to Alaska because we heard the hitchhikers earlier talking about how clean it is.  Bobby always takes the easy way out and always runs from his problems.  I liked this movie because it highlights and discusses a lot of problems society has, but the characters feel helpless to solve anything.  Bobby couldn't even get his toast per restaurant policy. I feel bad for him.  I will give this film a 6/10.

Natural Born Killers (1994)

Today's film is Natural Born Killers. I was excited about it because it was written by Quentin Tarantino.  It was a very creatively made film.  I just didn't care for it overall.

Both Mickey and Mallory Knox came from traumatized childhoods, and band together to travel across America killing people.  They leave one person alive to tell the story and eventually become media darlings.  America loves serial killers.  They're dangerous, exciting, and mysterious.  Mickey points out that technically they are mass murderers, but since they do it more than once, I think it counts.  There are so many movies, TV episodes, documentaries, and books about serial killers.

The film has a highly visual style that requires the viewer's full attention.  There are a lot of extra images in the background, and random commercials as well.  It's like the media: bombarding us with violence then commercials to calm us down and make us want to buy stuff.  Coca-cola let the filmmakers use their delightful polar bears feature in the movie without bothering to read it which I think is hilarious.

Mickey and Mallory are caught and inexplicably wind up in the same jail.  Mickey pulls a daring escape in the middle of a live interview and they both escape into the wilderness.  Maybe they shouldn't have been put in the same jail at all, that would've solved that problem.  I also liked Wayne, played by Robert Downey Jr, because he was everything wrong with the media.  He only cared about himself and his ratings and ended up with nothing.

The movie was visually exciting but I don't think I would watch it again.  I will give it a 6/10.

Naked Lunch (1991)

Today's movie is Naked Lunch.  I often have that on the weekends.  Let's talk about this film. It is bizarre but it is awesome.

It starts with Bill, who is an exterminator.  His friends and wife have been using his bug powder as drugs.  Bill is called in by the cops and a bug, which talks out of his butthole, tells him to kill his wife.  It only gets weirder from here.

Bill does end up killing his wife, Joan, but by accident.  He tries the bug powder drug and decides to play William Tell with her and shoots her in the head.  This seems kind of out of the left field, but there's a reason from this.  The author of the book, William S. Burroughs, accidentally shot his wife playing the same game.  So this event actually happened.

Bill leaves home and goes to the "Interzone" - Morocco, which he also does in real life.  This film was made during the Gulf War so it was actually filmed in Toronto. Just fyi.  Also fyi- Jaime from Mythbusters worked on the props in the movie! He built the mugwumps!

Bill becomes a writer and writes lots of reports on his typewriter.  During his drug episodes, the typewriter turns into a beetle looking thing with a talking butthole.  We also learn a lot about Bill's thought process. The real William S. Burroughs was an openly bisexual drug enthusiast, and the film is a semi-biopic about him writing the book.  The real book is about... I don't know.  All of the people in the film are also based on real people.

Bill meets an American couple in the Interzone, Tom and Joan (the wife, Joan, looks exactly like his wife, Joan). She seems like an important character that we will look out for.

After Bill's typewriter eats Tom's typewriter (yes eats) Tom kidnaps Bill's typewriter for revenge and destroys it.  Bill and Joan use an Arabic typewriter to write some smut and it turns into a wily humpcrab and gets tossed off the balcony by some dominatrix looking lady.  What we don't know yet is that the dominatrix is actually Sheriff Brody in disguise and he is a drug lord.  (Random thought. He also played the Captain on Seaquest 2032 and I loved that show when I was little. Does anyone else remember that show?)

Crap I thought I could explain this film and I can't.  It's really easy to dismiss it as being about drugs.  Well it is about drugs, but it's also a lot more than that.  It's more about the difficulty of the creative process.

After Tom destroys the typewriter, Bill's adorable boy toy Kiki takes him to an elven kiln where they make him an oddly shaped typewriter with +5 writing power.  Look at it! It's like a doctor told it to open its mouth and say ahhhh.  This is so funny.

This thing is called a mugwump.  Wait, wasn't Dumbledore a mugwump? Yes, he was a Supreme Mugwump until the Ministry of Magic booted him. A mugwump is an amphibian like creature, like a murloc except it has no spines.  It also has tubes that drip out jizz, you know like a man has a tube, I'm just gonna stop here. The jizz gets you high.  The mugwump produces the jizz at a high rate in the midst of the creative/writing process.  It's like mana for writers!  It can also make jizz without it, but at a much slower rate.  Bill finds many of them chained up surrounded by junkies.

Can Bill stop the drug lord?  Well no he doesn't want to.  I will give this film a 9/10 because it is the most creative film I have seen in a long time.

Les parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) (1964)

Today's film is The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. This movie is colorful and beautiful.  I love the jewel tones of Genevieve's house.  What's unique about this movie is that every single bit of dialog is sung, like an opera!

The first exposure I had to this film was while watching Futurama.  Fry's dog waits for 12 years for him to return, which he never does.  The song playing during the final scene is from this film.  If you listen, the music is repeated several times during Genevieve's speaking/singing parts.

The plot is pretty straightforward.  Genevieve loves Guy, but they are both young.  Genevieve lives with her mom and works at her umbrella shop, while Guy has been drafted into military service.  Since there was a war at the time, Guy expects to be gone for two years.  Since this is obviously Genevieve's first love, she is totally devastated.

Two months after Guy's departure, Genevieve discovers that she's pregnant.  Meanwhile, her mom's umbrella shop isn't doing too well.  They're running short on money, and it's probably because her mom, Emery, wears a brand new outfit every single scene.  I think she's spending way too much money, and when forced to sell her jewels to pay off debts, she doesn't want to.  She relents and decides to part with her pearl necklace, which catches the attention of a handsome jewel dealer, Roland.  Later, Roland confesses to Emery that he fell in love with Genevieve at first sight and would like to marry her.  Both of them are afraid to admit that she's pregnant to him.  Roland states that he's going away for business and will return a few months later for her answer.

A few months pass, and Genevieve is getting big! There is no way to hide her pregnancy any longer, and she is worried about what Roland might think.  Guy, the father, knows about the pregnancy and talks about it with her through the mail.  Roland doesn't care that she's pregnant, and wants to raise the baby as his own.  He loves Genevieve no matter what.  Genevieve is impressed and flattered.  She knows the baby needs a safe and secure household, and who knows - Guy could be killed in the war any day now.  Then, what would become of her?  She does what she thinks is right and accepts Roland's proposal so she and her baby can live the life of luxury and never have to resort to selling off possessions just to not lose their house.

Soon, Guy's military service is up!  He happily returns to Cherbourg, but Genevieve is not there.  Where is she?  Her mom has sold the umbrella shop and moved away.  Guy learns from his family that Genevieve married Roland and had her baby.  She didn't even bother telling him herself.  Guy is very depressed.

Later, Guy marries his friend Madeleine out of desperation, knowing he can't have his true love.  He has a son with her. He buys a gas station, like he promised to do with Genevieve.  Years pass, and a rich older Genevieve stops at his gas station with her daughter, Francoise.  Guy has named his son Francois.  She asks him if she wants to see his daughter, and he says no.  He's never seen her before and it would hurt too much.  They both quietly and uneventfully part ways.

Even though every line is sung, this film is more realistic than most romance movies because most people don't end up with their first true love, and they have to make the most of what they do have in life.  I will give this film an 8/10.