Ingenjör Andrées Luftfärd (The Flight of the Eagle)

Ingenjör Andrées Luftfärd (The Flight of the Eagle) is one of Jan Troell's grand epics. Sometimes I like his mode of storytelling; this one in particular, however, left me a little cold.

It's an odd story to tell anyway, since it is very much about a doomed nationalist project of the late 19th century. But I think the thing that sort of bugs me about it is that Troell doesn't really use his film to analyze how and why these men ended up dying in the middle of a frozen wasteland. Instead we watch their demise in a sort of detached way – not detached from the men's emotional journey but certainly detached from the context of that journey. Troell is interested in the men's experience. Fine! But, he indicts no one, really, except Andrée himself, as if the project was simply one of ego. This is unfortunate, to my mind, and it makes the film a kind of lone-man-against-the-elements movie instead of a real portrait of Sweden in 1897.

The takeoff of the balloon is totally awesome, but the movie (and, of course, the 1897 expedition) both go downhill from there.

Volver a Empezar (Begin the Beguine) (1982)

José Luis Garci's Volver a Empezar (Begin the Beguine) is a sad, charming story about a dying man. It's also very simply told. The film is a kind of tribute to people whose lives were interrupted by World War II, who left Spain and never came back. A generation – as the film says at the very end – whose lives were interrupted. I quite liked it.

Perhaps most improbably, of the 13 films that were nominated for the Foreign Language Oscar in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s – films by Pedro Almodóvar, Carlos Saura, Luis Buñuel, Francisco Rovira Beleta, and Jaime de Armiñán – this is the only film that won the award.

Two other Garci films were nominated for Oscars (Sesión Continua and Asignatura Aprobada), and I've managed to get my hands on subtitled bootleg copies of these movies recently, so I am sure I will watch them soon.

P.S. I have no explanation at all for this rainbow on the poster. Volver a Empezar is not a film about rainbows or floods or peace or homosexuality.

Il Compleanno (2009)

Il Compleanno (David's Birthday) is a gay-interest movie sort of typical of the late 1990s and early 2000s, one in which queer desire is fatal, causing grief and destruction. It seems, in other words, outmoded even for 2009, when it was made. It's all a bit too Thomas Mann for my taste. But, in truth, this is a much more complex drama than one only about the deadliness of queer desire. I thought all of the characters were intriguing. The beautiful beloved object was the least interesting of the movie's six characters. If only the director had balanced things better, this actually showed promise, but Marco Filiberti, who wrote and directed, seems focused on the fatalities and destruction caused by queer desire – even caused by the desirable object of queer desire. And so David's Birthday is quite a disappointing party.

Helden (Heroes) (1958)

Helden is very funny. It's based on Shaw's play Arms and the Man and works very well. It has much of Shaw's moralism, but is way more fun than his usually talky comedies. Franz Peter Wirth's adaptation is filmic through and through - there are almost no traces of staginess.

Lady in the Dark (1944)

Lady in the Dark is a strange movie. In the first place, it is outrageously sexist – perhaps even by the standards of 1944 – and in the second, it transmutes the stage musical into something that isn't really a musical at all but has these sort of fantasy numbers, a bit like Chicago would do 58 years later. But the filmmakers also cut "My Ship", which is frankly unforgivable. Mischa Auer is hilariously genius (as usual) in a supporting part.

Malila: the Farewell Flower (2017)

I loved Malila: the Farewell Flower (มะลิลา). It never got a theatrical release in the U.S., although it played several film festivals, including LGBTQ ones. It's a gorgeous movie about spirituality and queerness and flowers and death and grief. It stars a brilliant Sukollawat Kanarot, who is a big TV star in Thailand, and it was directed by trans filmmaker Anucha Boonyawatana. It's lovely. Oh and the score is gorgeous!

Cactus Flower (1969)

Oh my god, Ingrid Bergman is so funny in this! Cactus Flower is actually very, very funny. It's a non-Neil Simon Neil Simon farce starring Neil Simon regular Walter Matthau, and it's delightful. I am sure it works perfectly as a stage play, and if it is a bit stagey here, it is performed brilliantly. I really liked this.

Khartoum (1966)

What a strange and intriguing film Khartoum is. In the first place it's insanely orientalist and racist, and there's so much blackface. But the battle sequences – and this is a film in which battle sequences are the most important element – are very, very cool. The photography is also brilliant, gorgeous even, and the whole thing, despite its so-called epic qualities, is actually rather tight and nicely directed.

As usual, I am surprised by Basil Dearden. He is a very good director. (Weirdly, I still haven't seen his gay film, Victim. Soon, perhaps.)

Birds of Passage (2018)

For me Pájaros de Verano (which is being distributed in the U.S. as Birds of Passage) didn't quite work. The feelings in it are just a little too restrained; the direction feels almost cold, which simply doesn't fit with the subject matter here – family crime melodrama. I really liked both of the film's stars, Carmiña Martínez and José Acosta, but again I wish both of them had been allowed to let loose a little bit, especially at the film's end. As it is, the film's first act, which has the least amount of action in it, ends up being Pájaros de Verano's most compelling section. It's a shame, because Ciro Guerra's Abrazo del Serpiente was my favorite film of 2016. Oh well. Pájaros de Verano looks cool, anyway.

A Midsummer's Nightmare

For me, Ari Aster's new horror-adjacent film Midsommar doesn't really work. I wanted it to work going in, and this is also my impression of most other people's response to Midsommar as well. We all want Ari Aster to succeed; we all have a great deal of good will toward him; we are compelled by many of the images he has in his brain; but we aren't quite satisfied with what he's putting out. I read one person saying I'd watch Ari Aster direct a commercial for yogurt, which is, to my mind, the kind of weak praise equivalent to saying I didn't really love this movie, but I'm glad he's making things I can watch. In any case, Midsommar is much, much better than a yogurt commercial, but it never really feels satisfactory.

I think the problem is that although Aster is operating using a great many of horror's generic conventions, he continually refuses to use the most pleasurable ones. So there is a building dread throughout Midsommar; one feels a kind of constant terror of the horrors to come, but then there are no serious or satisfying payoffs. We never see the monster; we never watch the knife sink in; no one gives us a good, terrifying scream. Instead, he actively elides moments that could do this. In Midsommar, for example, when Josh is killed while reading the Hårga's insane holy book, there is almost no build-up, there is no terror, and there is no satisfaction when he is actually killed. Plot-wise, Josh is killed for reasons typical of the genre: he sneaks out at night and tries to look at something he shouldn't look at. What this means is that Aster sets up genre expectations, but then doesn't deliver on them. Josh is killed in an almost matter-of-fact way, we see no blood or wound, and his body is disposed of immediately. Mark, too, is killed for generic reasons, but instead of us getting to watch this, Mark just disappears. The next time we see him, he's dead. Now, of course, Aster doesn't need to fulfill my generic expectations, but if he's not going to, I would appreciate something else instead. Don't do the genre, fine, but then give me invention. Take me somewhere else.

Midsommar consistently feels one note to me. All of the characters stay playing their single one note throughout the film – think about Christian's empty, beautiful stare or Pelle's placidity or even Dani's grief. And the way he's shot the film does this too. Everything in the film feels the same – slowly haunting, respectful, beautifully composed, and distant.

But enough complaining. As I say, Aster's work is consistently interesting, even if I left Midsommar emotionally unsatisfied. And like the person who wants to watch Aster's yogurt commercials, I too am interested in what he will do next. It's all too weird to be boring.

In Midsommar I am especially haunted by the images from before we get to Sweden – especially that image of Dani's sister with the pipe of vehicular exhaust taped directly to her face. It's a disgusting, disturbing image, and I neither can get it out of my head nor want to. Aster focuses on his corpses most intriguingly. We consistently are asked to look at the inside of bodies, of bodies broken open, showing us their viscera and often in various processes of decay (I am thinking, too, of the disgusting meat on the table during the May Queen's feast and the bear's viscera as they disembowel him). Aster is interested in what happens when the insides of our bodies are on the outside – as with the very strange thing that the Hårga did with Simon's lungs, which looked like wings as he hung there suspended in that little hut. I think all of this is very interesting, even if I don't think there's much to say about it except that it's there.

Natural Viagra

What I do think there is more to say about is the question of families – biological and found – with which both Hereditary and Midsommar are filled, drenched even. Obviously, Hereditary is about family (it's in the title), but I would say that that film is about a kind of tension between loving one's own biological family and loving the family that one has chosen. Annie's insane mother obviously opts for her chosen family over her biological one and is actively using and manipulating her biological kin in order to appease the family of the demon she serves. Hereditary and Midsommar are also about love and longing within the family. Peter in Hereditary and Dani in Midsommar want and want and want from their families, but they get nothing back. Peter begs his mother to love him, to forgive him; she cannot. And Dani emails and emails her sister and calls her parents; they don't reply. But meanwhile, the filmmaker actively destroys these families. We watch both of these families die in gruesome detail. What I am saying is that Aster is invested in destroying the family even though he is also interested in representing familial longing. Dani and Peter long for family desperately. They need their family's love. But not only is there no family, the family has been actively, violently broken apart (the images of the family's destruction in Hereditary are frankly horrific).

The family offers no solace

...And then in both films, the characters find familial solace in chosen families, or, if we're being technical about it, in cults. In Hereditary and even more clearly in Midsommar, we find that the main character begins to belong once she finds the chosen family. She avoids it, doesn't think it's a good thing, is disturbed by it, but once she gives in to the family she begins to find that she has a place there. (I think this is true of both Annie and Peter in Hereditary.)

I see both films, then, as stories of desperate need for familial belonging – of filial, fraternal, and sororal affection and desire. But in both Hereditary and Midsommar, that desire cannot be fulfilled by the biological family. Instead, the characters in these films must figure out how they fit within familial structures of belonging that are not biological. Peter and Annie can't find love in the biological family; they can only find belonging in the cult of Paimon. Dani and Christian can't make a family together, even after four years, but each can belong in his or her own way in the cult of the Hårga. In each case, affection/desire for one single person must be violently destroyed in favor of affection/desire being shared among the group, a kind of communism of affection that is understood in Aster's cults as superior to the love of a couple or the love of the nuclear family.

Whether Aster's own ethics see this kind of affection as superior to the love of a family or the love of a couple is a whole other question. Because of the affective confusion with which Aster leaves us at the end of both films, one finds it difficult to pinpoint the filmmaker's perspective on this desire for the family, and it is perhaps difficult in general to figure out whether Hereditary and Midsommar end happily or sadly. It may be that Aster sees the endings of both Midsommar and Hereditary as satisfying ones, in which each person has taken her rightful place in the world. For me that isn't true. I see the endings of both films as intellectually horrifying, even if they didn't work for me that way affectively. In other words, I wasn't scared, and I'm not haunted, but I do find myself intellectually troubled.

Welcome to your new family

The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956)

The Solid Gold Cadillac is delightful. Judy Holliday is so much fun. I thought this whole thing was really cute, but the ending, especially, was perfection.

Testament (1983)

I sort of hated Testament? Maybe not. But I guess I also don't really get what this movie was.

There's a nuclear explosion and radiation is everywhere, and then the family we're spending time with slowly dies off. Ok. But... what's the takeaway? We don't really know the family well enough or spend enough time with them for the film to work as a solid character study, and there's a journalling convention that the main character takes up early in the film that totally disappears by the end when it could really have helped us identify with her. Instead, everything in it just sort of happens in a kind of daze. Oh well.

Kevin Costner and Rebecca De Mornay have small parts as a married couple with a young child. It was cool to see them. And this movie was also filmed in Sierra Madre, very close to where I grew up and where my parents still attend church.

My Sister Eileen (1942)

My Sister Eileen is very funny. This film adaptation is a bit stagey for me, but the material is really rooted in a set of jokes about crowding one small apartment, so perhaps there is no helping the stageiness.

Gas, Food Lodging (1992)

Gas, Food Lodging is a very interesting film about women and sex from the early 1990s. I never saw it in the '90s and I watched it as part of an unseen movie night I am doing with some friends. We all enjoyed this. It's funny and surprising, even if it is occasionally paced in strange ways and totally forgets about some of its subplots.

Theodora Goes Wild (1936)

Theodora Goes Wild – which was directed by Richard Boleslawski, co-founder of the American Laboratory Theatre and student of Konstantin Stanislavsky – is absolutely hilarious. I laughed so much. Irene Dunne is perfect; Spring Byington is genius in a supporting part; Thomas Mitchell and Melvyn Douglas are also excellent.