Films I Watched This Week — Jan 20–26, 2025
Every Man for Himself (1980)
Every Man for Himself was called by director Jean-Luc Godard as his "second first film", looking at it as a sort of rebirth between the jump cut editing of 1960s Breathless and the slow-motion work here. The film is a social satire which explores themes Godard has explored since the beginning, most famously with Vivre sa vie and Contempt. Doomed relationships between men and women where sex is a commodity and prostitution is a form of an erotic power exchange. Less difficult to follow than his essayistic film 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, and a more linear storyline like Band of Outsiders, the film is divided into four chapters. The third chapter, "Commerce," which was the chapter I found the most fascinating, focuses on Isabelle and her day to day life as a prostitute. Her deadpan behavior deromanticizes prostitution which gives her the power advantage of the baffoonish clients who only want to humiliate her while flaunting their wealth and power. One of the most disturbing and darkly comic sequences has Isabella performing a sexual fantasy that involves a foursome designed like a Rube Goldberg sex machine.
The Sand Pebbles (1966)
The Sand Pebbles was an incredibly entertaining war picture that was also beautiful to look at with its remarkable production values. McQueen presents an oscar nominated performance of a conflicted character who represents anti-war attitudes.
Day of Wrath (1943)
It is a bleak and hopeless period set in a cold and Danish village in 1623 when people without question still believed in the existence of witches and went about on thousands of merciless witch hunts to catch and burn innocent people at the stake. Many of these villagers would conjure up any fantasy about a friend, lover, or neighbor who might or might not be a witch, whether out of hatred, jealousy, or the very belief that they actually were one. When Day of Wrath was released and premiered in 1942 it was during the darkest times of the Nazi occupation of Denmark in which several Danes were being taking away and deported to death camps. You could look at the film as a historical document on the unscientific and irrational age in which people accepted such things as sorcery and witchcraft, while also viewing it as a allegorical commentary of the political climate throughout modern Denmark at the time.
Day of Wrath (1942) is on MY TOP 300 FILMS OF ALL TIME
Story of G.I. Joe (1945)
The story of G.I. Joe is a tribute to the American infantryman (G.I. Joe) during World War II, told through the eyes of Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Ernie Pyle. The film concentrates on one company (C Company, 18th Infantry) that Pyle accompanies into combat in Tunisia and Italy. The Story of G.I. Joe is as authentic as you're going to get without all the war bravado that came from most war movies at the time. Actor Burgess Meredith was cast as Ernie Pyle because he was lesser known and had experience serving as a captain in the Army. Before filming, Meredith spent time with Pyle, who was recuperating in New Mexico from the emotional effects of surviving an accidental bombing by the Army Air Forces in Normandy. Nine war correspondents are listed as technical advisors, and the Army agreed to the director's request for 150 soldiers as extras during the six weeks of filming in late 1944.
Evolution (2015)
Evolution (2015) is an eerie and unsettling sci-fi fantasy that recalls the body horror films of David Cronenberg and the 1932 pre-code classic The Island of Lost Souls. It is a surreal and hypnotic nightmare that explores what happens when we, the adults, interfere with the gender roles of children in our society. Beautifully photographed with both haunting and disturbing imagery, the film gives a skin-crawling sense of dread that is on par with Upstream Color and Under the Skin. A brilliant and masterful work by French filmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović.
Dodes'ka-den (1970)
A stark depiction of Japanese society, Dodes'Ka-Den is one of Akira Kurosawa's most underapprecated works, in which Kurosawa humanizes a marginalized community of people trapped by their existence.
My Night at Maud's (1969)
My Night at Mauds tells the story of a Catholic engineer’s faith with God and how he must remain true to his beliefs when he is tested sleeping next to a naked divorcee. And yet his motives seem to be less about testing his faith but more about presenting a kind of self-righteous image that he is trying to project onto himself. My Night at Maud’s is part of director Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, which are six different stories that he first written in book form before he turned to direct. These six stories focused on character’s who arrive at moral decisions within their life, decisions that explore thoughtful and philosophical ideas on sex, body language, and the psychological differences between men and women.
My Night At Mauds (1969) is on My Top 300 Films of All Time List
Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
Anatomy of a Fall is a compelling and thought-provoking courtroom drama that asks its audience how they think about things. Like a Hitchcockian thriller, it has characters who would rather choose what they want to believe rather than believe what the truth actually is. We all construct our own stories about others; which are partial and quite biased, but the truth is we never fully know that person. When we expect to arrive at a truth near the conclusion of the story, will we even care what the actual truth to that conclusion is?
Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000)
Fantastic visuals with a weak story that told me nothing new or interesting about the world of vampires.
Koko: A Talking Gorilla (1978)
It won't take long for the viewer to fall in love with Koko. Its up for debate how ethical it is to keep a wild gorilla in captivity instead of allowing them to be out and free in their own natural habitat. Yet, these scientific experiments are very educational and thought-provoking as they teach us more about communication, language, and how we can blur the lines between man and animal.
Koko R.I.P. 1971-2018
Mädchen in Uniform (1931)
A vital landmark in the history of queer cinema, Mädchen in Uniform is a remarkable tragedy about love between women at a boarding house for girls. Beyond its acclaim as a groundbreaking work in LGBTQ culture, Mädchen in Uniform had also been hailed as a timeless fable of the innocent against the totalitarian forces of sexual oppression, especially since it was produced in Germany amidst the rise of the Nazi party. Due to the film's overt and openly lesbian themes, the film was banned as "decadent" by the Nazi regime, which reportedly attempted to burn all of the existing prints. By then, though, several had been dispersed around the world. The director and a great number of the Jewish cast fled Germany soon after the banning, while the ones who could not escape in time sadly died in the camps.
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
The Hudsucker Proxy is a outlandish and zany screwball comedy that is a mix of Howard Hawks His Girl Friday and Frank Capra's Meet John Doe, sprinkled with just a tad of the quirky comedy style of Preston Sturges. While not everything in this Coen Bros fantasy works, the film still holds a charm, which is mostly because of the wonderful performance by Jennifer Jason Leigh Leigh. Harnessing the energy of Rosalind Russell's character in His Girl Friday, she plays the fast talking, hard-bitten girl reporter with a snap and an edge.
Ikiru (1952)
Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same boring bureaucratic position for thirty years. He has never missed a day, performed the same task repeatedly, and has not really accomplished anything. He is nicknamed “the Mummy” at work because his character is lifeless, just drifting through life and not really experiencing it. His wife is dead, and his son and daughter-in-law live with him in hopes of receiving his retirement pension. Watanabe doesn’t know yet that he has a fatal form of stomach cancer, and when he discovers this, he will learn he has less than six months to live. Ikiru is director Akira Kurosawa’s life-affirming masterpiece of a man who knows he is going to die and finally sees the importance he can bring to other people. In the beginning, when receiving the medical news, Watanabe descends into a form of despair and defeat, wallowing in self-pity. Little does he know these are only just the first of a series of stages before arriving to an realization of his own importance, which involves overcoming the inertia of the bureaucracy he has slaved for, to help the less fortunate who are in need.
Ikiru (1952) is on MY TOP 100 GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME LIST
Like Water for Chocolate (1991)
Set in Mexico at the turn of the 20th century Like Water for Chocolate (1992) tells the exotic story of a forbidden love consummated only through food. The film is a sizzling romantic fable that celebrates passion, liberation, sensual pleasures, and the resilient spirit of women. Its narrative uses magical realism to tell its story, which is central to modern Latin film and literature. It begins with the assumption that magic can change the fabric of the real world if it is transmitted through the emotions of people in love. Differing gender roles and the breaking of cultural traditions are central to the three sisters in the de la Garza family. Tita is the maternal caretaker who breaks tradition; Gertrudis embodies the duality of the masculine and feminine roles; and Rosaura, an upholder of the traditional female role, fails to fulfill it. The film displays strong women redefining what it means to be a female with the help of Tita's magical cooking. The strength of both Tita and Gertrudis breaks the family free from the archaic tradition that has oppressed the sisters and torn their family apart. They establish new traditions while blurring the lines of gender roles, giving everyone the equality and freedom to choose what roles they want to fill and what lives they want to live.
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