Year of the Dragon (1985)

This was intensely racist. It was also bloated and way too long. And its main character was a hateful, misogynist prick. John Lone is sort of wonderful in Year of the Dragon, though. Definitely a star. I think the thing that I just can't understand about this film is the way Thailand, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Hong Kong, and China are all conflated by this movie. There's a great, redeemable Chinese character who gets to tell Mickey Rourke's character off – cool. But then he of course comes around to seeing things from Rourke's point of view. No thanks. This was rough going.

Aferim!

Wow wow wow wow. Radu Jude is just so good. First off, this film was made in the crispest, most breathtakingly beautiful black and white. And it's funny... for a long time! It moves through its first act with a sort of silliness and easy farce that is quite delightful. And then the racism of 19th century Romania emerges, slowly, along with, of course, the abject poverty of the people who are at the center of Aferim!, people who live in stark contrast to the wealthy Turkish merchants and boyars, who treat the poor like dirt. But then the film just takes a turn: the main character sells a young Romani boy despite his desperate pleas. And then things get worse. The film maintains its buoyant tone, but Aferim! moves almost inexorably toward something truly atrocious, and when it gets to where it is headed, it's stunning, insane, and merciless.

I was familiar with Jude's Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, and incisive, whip smart analysis of contemporary Romanian prejudices, corruption, racism, and misogyny. And Aferim! is obviously of a piece with work like that – its critique analyzes contemporary misogyny by finding its underlying bases. But Aferim! really took my breath away. It's just does not shy away from the consequences of slavery and racial capitalism. This is a hard movie. And it's excellent.

Heaven's Gate (1980)

Heaven's Gate, Michael Cimino's infamous follow-up to The Deer Hunter, got a bad rap, y'all. This movie is difficult, for sure, and the long first act in New England doesn't really make much sense until the second and third acts, but this film has some really great stuff in it. I especially loved the performances of Kris Kristofferson and Jeff Bridges (he's superb in this). And, of course, Isabelle Huppert is wonderful. I really enjoyed this movie, and I found myself deeply moved during the sequence when they read the names of all of the immigrant men on the kill list. This is a pretty extraordinary portrait of racism and capitalism and the way they worked together in this particular period in U.S. American history, and it's a masterfully made movie. I watched this on DVD - from the Criterion release - in its Cimino-approved three-and-a-half-hour version.

Captain Newman, M.D. (1963)

Captain Newman, M.D. is about a military psychiatric hospital during WWII. It's a 1960s movie, unlike most of the WWII content I've been consuming that was made during the war, so this one has a lot of space to be sentimental. And Captain Newman, M.D. is mostly that. It's also mostly a comedy...? The film, in fact, opens with a herd of sheep running all around the base. The sheep have no purpose at all within the plot except that they create farcical situations when they escape and they make everyone run around catching them. In a totally absurd sequence late in the movie, sheep are in ambulances, sheep are in taxis, sheep are in pickup trucks. It looks like something from Wallace and Grommit. 

Anyway, the comedy doesn't work in this movie, or rather, I guess it could work if so much of the movie wasn't invested in talking about the psychological effects of the war, but it's the psychological drama stuff that is actually good. The film stars Gregory Peck, Angie Dickinson, and Tony Curtis, but the great roles are given to the patients: Eddie Albert as a psychotic general, Bobby Darin as a depressed and angry plane-crash survivor, and Robert Duvall as a near-catatonic ghost of a man. Bobby Darin, especially, is amazing. His scenes, which are about uncovering what he experienced in a plane crash with an officer he admired, give us no flashbacks at all. Instead, Darin narrates it for us. It's heartbreaking, and he's wonderful. I was skeptical of this movie's comedic tone, and this whole sequence still brought me to tears. All of the Bobby Darin stuff is excellent. The movie might be worth watching just for him.

You can watch Captain Newman, M.D. on YouTube.

Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train

Ceux Qui M'aiment Prendront le Train is a complex melodrama from Patrice Chéreau that's filled with queer characters. This is one of those gay films from the 1990s that I always intended to watch but for some reason never got around to. It's most notable, I think, for heartthrob Vincent Perez's role as a trans woman, and this role does turn out to be surprising and wonderful. But Those Who Love Me is more interesting for the other characters, I think. They're complex and beautiful and fascinating, especially the ones played by Pascal Greggory and Bruno Todeschini. In any case, this is a very confident ensemble picture from Patrice Chéreau (it also stars Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Charles Berling, Roschdy Zem, and Dominique Blanc), and I liked it very much.

I watched this on DVD, but I think it's streaming on VUDU at least.

Swanee River: the Story of Stephen C. Foster (1939)

Oh my god. This is a biopic of the composer Stephen Foster, who wrote "Oh, Susanna!", "Swanee River", "Camptown Races" and a bunch of other songs. It stars Don Ameche, who is great! Andrea Leeds is not given anything to do except love Stephen Foster. Swanee River also stars... Al Jolson as EP Christy (of Christy's Minstrels fame). This makes the film truly unhinged as a historical object. There is an insane amount of blackface in this movie, and Swanee River seems to think it is laudable that Foster took music from the enslaved Black folks he knew and made good money off of it. This is sort of a crazy movie. And its ending is completely bananas.

Swanee River covers over the likely fact that Stephen Foster killed himself. It also invents a very strange alcoholism plot that feels completely fake onscreen, even if the man actually was a hard drinker. E.P. Christy, as it turns out, also committed suicide two years before Foster did. But Swanee River would have us believe that Christy (in blackface, of course) rushed from the theatre to Foster's bedside and then back to the performance, where he performed Foster's latest tune, "Old Folks at Home", to a crowd who sang along (they apparently memorize the lyrics spontaneously). Then the film – while Jolson and the crown are still singing – cuts to images from the American South, including a man picking cotton, a plantation mansion, and an old Black woman sitting outside a cottage. This is how the movie ends. It's unhinged.

Anyway you can watch this technicolor non-masterpiece on YouTube if you so desire.

The Salt Mines (1990)

Whoa. The Salt Mines is a powerful documentary (and only 45 minutes) about transvestite crack users in New York City in the late 1980s. This is a really important film, especially for the way the subjects describe the Mariel boat lift, life on the streets in New York City, their understandings of their sexualities (and genders), crack use, religion, and their own disposability because of capitalism. Their living conditions are horrific – the salt mines are a storage facility for salt used on the roads when it snows – but these women are fascinating.

Paisan (1946)

Roberto Rossellini's Paisa' is six vignettes about US Americans in Italy as everybody (including Italian resistance fighters) continues to fight the Germans. Rossellini's camera scours the ruins of the peninsula, and Paisa' is a legitimately heartbreaking film. I don't know why it took me this long to see this movie – perhaps it was the total bleakness of Rossellini's previous film, Rome, Open City – but I'm glad I finally saw it. I completely loved this.

(I'm not really sure what year to classify this under. IMDb says it was released in the US in March of 1948, but I know it was nominated for a Story & Screenplay Oscar during the 1949 season. I'm gonna do '49 just because the whole point of these years is to keep track of awards seasons. 

And another thing: the original title, seemingly everywhere, is rendered as Paisà. But it's Paisa' on the title card of the film, and that's what it is on the poster, too. I'm not sure I understand the confusion here.)