A surprisingly good film from 1963 about the Boxer Rebellion and the siege of the legations in Peking/Beijing. It’s a bit corny at times as one would expect, but then most modern films are plagued with much worse flaws. Charlton Heston is a badass American who drinks and whores and shoots and punches, David Niven is a refined tea-sipping Englishman as one would expect, and Ava Gardner is a Russian whore who is clearly up for a bit of hard military penetration and artillery bombardment if you know what I mean.
I have some mild critiques, e.g. it’s largely bloodless, at times I wasn’t sure what the situation was, exactly, but it’s otherwise a good solid film and highly enjoyable. It’s on Youtube at the moment:
Not merely one of my favourite films, but one of my favourite wintery films, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a film with great cinematography, and one of the best soundtracks & scripts of all Bond films.
A quirky, violent, often amusing film about a spergy loser who joins a Karate dojo. It was in some ways very predictable, so you can sense the plot twist coming – I got the feeling I’d seen many films with the same story point, though I couldn’t actually name any; but it’s very well done and all performances are good. Jesse Eisenberg is a strangely compelling actor; he radiates a kind of cold, spergy energy, which should make him unwatchably uncharismatic but instead he really fills the screen. Alessandro Nivola’s manipulative, oddly likeable Sensei is also great, and reminded me a little of a martial arts guru I knew years ago (perhaps there is a sensei/sifu “type”), except that the film version is more human than the one I knew.
There’s the usual Hollywood stuff about dumb right-wingers who drive pickup trucks and probably voted for Orange Man Bad, but by now I just assume that every modern film will come with a dash of propaganda, and I kind of tune it out. It’s also quite unrealistic, e.g. there are a few casual murders, so we seem to be in one of these worlds where the police only exist when the plot needs them, and one can otherwise kill people without consequences.
I grew up with Bill & Ted, the first (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure) from 1989 and the sequel (Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey) from 1991. I haven’t seen the first two films in literally decades, and vaguely remembered them as goofy, well-made comedies with Alex Winter and the of course more famous Keanu Reeves. The protagonists are basically retarded Californians of a kind I assumed were 100% parody until I met expats like this, and realised, Holy shit, in California everyone is genuinely retarded.
I wasn’t exactly enthused about a 30-year-later sequel, as Hollywood has a bad track record of such enterprises, but to my surprise this was a pretty solid, enjoyable comedy.
The plot, from what I remember of the earlier films, reprises the original need for Bill Preston and Ted Logan to travel in time and collect various notable personages. The Infogalactic entry for the first film:
In Futuristic City, 2688, humanity exists as a utopian society due to the inspiration of the music and wisdom of the Two Great Ones: Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves). Rufus (George Carlin) is tasked by the leaders to travel back to San Dimas, California, in 1988 using a time machine disguised as a telephone booth to ensure that Bill and Ted, who are dim-witted metalhead high school students, get a good grade in their final history oral report and allow them to pass the class. Should they fail, Ted’s father, Police Captain John Logan (Hal Langdon), plans to ship Ted to a military academy in Alaska, ending Bill and Ted’s fledgling band, the “Wyld Stallyns”, thus altering the future.
From the Future Perfect projections of the earlier films, the duo are destined to write a song which will unite humanity, but in 2020 they are middle-aged failures who can’t even play a wedding song without the guests recoiling in horror; there’s some kind of “reality will end if they don’t play the Song to Unite the Universe in the next 24 hours” plot device, but being largely talentless the pair decide to travel into the future to steal the song they are destined to write, from their future selves. This is by far the best section of the film, as they encounter variously weird loser version of themselves.
As in the earlier films, they have to assemble a band from the distant past. It’s all good-natured fun; however, I couldn’t help but notice that with the exception of Bill & Ted themselves, and Mozart, the band are all “people of colour”; including Ling Lun, legendary founder of Chinese music, but even then it’s not enough that LL is non-white: they arbitrarily decide to make him a woman. I could hardly cavil at the inclusion of Jimi Hendrix or Louis Armstrong, but when I think of the entire history of known music, it is mostly white, unlike the film’s band (mostly black). I’m just surprised they didn’t make Mozart black, or a woman, or a tranny; although I was pleased that they let him expostulate in German without translation, even if he expresses delight at Ling Lun’s flute music (in reality, Mozart hated the flute). There is also some popular black rapper called Kid Crud who is treated as a god of music, but who I’d never even heard of; he talks in the kind of polysyllabic patter common to fraudulent black “intellectuals”, to the point Murdoch Murdoch even had an episode with a black character talking like this a couple of years ago. It seems to reflect a higher verbal IQ, relative to g, among blacks (I’ve also noticed it among the Irish).
The band includes a prehistoric drummer, a grunting negroid creature called Grom, which is also the name of a good Italian ice cream shop. So that’s four blacks, one Chinese transsexual, and one Austrian.
Finally, when Bill and Ted have the band assembled in the right place, they still don’t have a song, because they are actually talentless; and then realise their daughters can write and perform the song, since all they know is that the Song to Unite Humanity was credited to Preston & Logan, which of course could as well be their daughters . So as with the mediocre Avengers Endgame film, the achievements & titles of white men are voluntarily handed on to women and People of Colour. To be fair, the daughters are music nerds so it is plausible, and actually rather pleasing, that they could inherit the mantle, and the whole thing is so good-natured that I could mostly ignore the anti-white, anti-Western message.
They learn that it’s not so much the song which will save humanity, as everyone playing it together; I thought then of those who dismiss the old gods as mere Jungian archetypes, or figments of the subconscious – for would everyone spontaneously sing a crappy song in unison? Just as, to be genuinely & deeply popular, a song would need to obey eternal musical principles, so one could say that Jungian archetypes like Wotan or Apollo would have no lasting value, did they not reflect something real; if they were not, in fact, real.
The song in question is actually just bland noise of some sort.
The supergroup of a prehistoric grunting negroid drummer, the fraudulently transsexual inventor of Chinese music, Mozart, Louis Armstrong, Jimi Hendrix, and King Crud, produce an utterly unmemorable barrage of vaguely musical exuberance. It’s a phenomenon I’ve noted with other supergroups, e.g. The Traveling Wilburys; you would think that a group comprising Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne would be pretty amazing but I found their music to be on the minor side, pleasant and hummable but nothing more, as if all that talent mostly cancelled itself out. Perhaps, that’s the secret Globalist message of the Bill & Ted song, to take all the variety and greatness of humanity and align it to create destructive interference, to reduce everyone, to reduce variety and greatness and birth der Letzter Mensch, the “last man” whereof Nietzsche wrote.
Amusingly, the hideous wedding song Bill & Ted play at the beginning is actually pretty good, a kind of late 90-s Spiritualized work:
I was pleasantly reminded of Spiritualized’s majestic ‘No God Only Religion’:
although, to be fair, it’s hardly a wedding song. Perhaps the genuine diversity of the Earth’s human races & ethnicities & cultures strikes the average globalist as a highly disagreeable, jarring dissonance, much as the above wedding song or ‘No God Only Religion’ would the average listener (I was utterly alienated by Spiritualized’s “noise” tracks until I saw them live, whereupon something clicked). And for me, the bland homogeneity of the film’s final song is just dispiritingly empty, a fitting music for der Letzter Mensch.
While it is a good-hearted, fun film, it is anachronistically so. In the late 80s and early 90s, in that interim between the Cold War and 9/11, there was time enough for fun, for optimism; in 2020 it seems strange, not so much naive as wilfully oblivious. The time for fun has long since passed.
A film I only recently saw, two decades after its release. I wish I could have seen it at the time, 1999, knowing nothing about it, but there it is. It’s presented as “found footage” from three young would-be film-makers who head into the woods to make a documentary about a witch, and of course end up coming to a bad end.
I found it good fun, atmospheric, intelligent, with great acting and discretion. The witch is never seen, which gives the film a psychological depth – we witness not the horror itself, but the characters’ reaction to the horror; with, always, the possibility they are insane or hallucinating. Their steadily deteriorating good sense & hope are what we primarily experience, as e.g. one of the characters kicks their map into the creek out of frustration, leaving them totally lost.
The finale is very good indeed, with the characters finding their doomed way to a derelict house full of bloody handprinted walls and filth.
Being on something of a Swayze bender, I decided to rewatch the 1989 throat-ripping classic, Roadhouse. Let’s see how much of the plot you can deduce from these screenshots:
So basically, Dalton (Patrick Swayze) is a cooler, a lead-bouncer, who is propositioned to sort out a violent shithole called The Double Deuce, “the kind of place where they sweep up the eyeballs after closing”. He immediately fires a bunch of degenerates, including an amusing character who fucks a 80s blonde in the backroom, “you gonna be my regular Saturday night thing” and then protests “I’m on my break!” when Dalton sticks his head in to fire him. Dalton rents a room in a farm and does tai chi style exercises half-naked, but also immediately lights a cigarette upon awaking,
because this is a 80s action film. The farm is opposite a villa owned by the villainous Brad Wesley
– one of the greatest of 80s villains – played by Coach Red Pill:
There are loads of 80s titties and 80s blondes, and Coach Red Pill’s henchmen are an assemblage of fired maths teachers, fat American slobs, and homosexual rapists. One of them drives a monster truck.
So anyway, Coach Red Pill demands tribute payments from local store owners and Dalton ends up fighting his various henchmen and saving the town. CRP makes a great villain, one of these bad guys who simply enjoys life and enjoys his villainy – he has no rancour, no ill will, he’s just a local kingpin and relishes the role. Dalton calls in assistance from the legendary cooler Wade Garrett,
played by Sam Elliott. I believe we have here the key to 80s splendour – the supporting cast must be at least as good as the supposed protagonist.
The script is particularly memorable, with zingers every couple of minutes, and a great deal of homoeroticism. The film closed out the 80s, the greatest decade known to man.
It might just become your regular Saturday night thing.
I was surprised how well this early 90s action flick held up; I would now regard it as one of the best action films I’ve seen. Keanu Reeves is the star, a FBI agent called Johnny Utah going after a gang of bank robbers; he is here very much in his 90s role as a kind of blank, a “neo”, likeable enough but not to be compared to his profoundly human old dog John Wick; the real power of the film is from the perfect balance of the almost-not-there Reeves and the brilliant supporting cast, e.g. Mister Joshua himself, the excellent Gary Busey as Utah’s older partner who theorises that the bank robbers are in fact surfers, leading to Utah embedding himself in the surfer community.
And then of course there is Dalton, Patrick Swayze, surely one of the most beautiful men, the most poetic, sensitive, violent, spiritual. Here he’s actually called Boddhi and is the head of the surfers, full of gems of hippy wisdom but also perfectly capable of delivering the meritorious beatdown.
There are also little cameos, e.g. Tom Sizemore as an undercover DEA agent, Anthony Kiedis (Swan from the Red Hot Chili Peppers) as a belligerent surfer, and a great John C McGinley (Sgt O’Neill from Platoon) as a the obligatory 80s stupid police boss.
It is wonderfully directed by Katherine Bigelow, with adroit and imaginative camerawork. She has the sensitivity to let the characters breathe and be complexly human & brutal. There is a rich humanity to the film, with even quite minor characters given a convincing, individual presence & magic.
The whole hippy surfer thing, about escaping, Matrix-like, from the workaday system is well-handled; for all its evident silliness, somehow it seems plausible here, with Patrick Swayze talking the talk and surfing the surf. In these moments, you can believe in the Männerbund, in the conflict & confrontation of a man with his fate, and his eventual enlightenment & release, even if in death.
Two Brazilian films about the BOPE, Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais, military-grade police specialised in urban environment warfare. I’d meant to see Elite Squad for years, as it comes up on every /pol-approved-film/TV list, and by God it did not disappoint.
The first film focuses mainly on two new BOPE recruits from the perspective of Captain Nascimento, who is hoping one of them can become his successor and he can retire to look after his newborn child. Naturally things don’t work out the way he wants and there is enormous violence.
The second film shifts the focus solidly onto Nascimento as he is kicked upstairs into circles of political corruption.
I loved both films. They are definitely fascist masterpieces, using “fascist” to mean “realistic about the intractable dirt and violence of humanity”. There is a great character in the first, André Mathias, a bespectacled negro who is a Law student at the local university and also a BOPE soldier; scenes with him in a seminar room, surrounded by upper middle class white Leftists who are gibbering about Foucault and police brutality; he looks like he wants to shoot them all in the head. I found it especially pleasing as I know a Brazilian Fascist Chad who won a scholarship to an elite private school and was surrounded by what he calls iphone liberals.
Nascimento is a fantastic character. He has the sad, purposeful eyes of a man long familiar with death.
Every wound, every beating, every torture, every execution, every shoot-out, has left a mark on this face and this soul. Which is how it should be.
A film I half-saw in my teens, but only now watched from beginning to end. It is definitely one of the great 80s action/buddy-cop films with Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell as maverick badass cops forced to team up to take out some nefarious individuals. It hits every note perfectly: the protagonists have carefully distinct personalities & lifestyles, the bad guys are horrendous & grotesque, there’s a great deal of homoerotic humour, and of course a scene in a strip club, and a scene with Kurt Russell in drag. What more could you possibly want?
Extremely enjoyable. A quite basic plot but of course convoluted in presentation, with Ritchiean bravura; the joy of it is very catching – one feels that Ritchie was probably chuckling as he wrote the script, and there’s a similar sense of ebullience from the entire cast. The characters and casting elevate this otherwise standard film: Matthew McConaughey is a perfectly-cast crime boss (ruthless and human), Charlie Hunnam is a likeable lieutenant, and there are two excellent surprises with Hugh Grant as a sleazy blackmailer (by turns terrified and gloating) and Colin Farrell as a mythic Irish Londoner – down-to-earth bad boy turned into a local boxing gym mentor.
It has a pleasing sense of structural elaboration and fractal harmony. So for all the Ritchiean chaos, I note that one can apply Vox Day’s Social-Sexual Hierarchy quite well:
Matthew McConaughey’s boss Michael Pearson – Alpha
Charlie Hunnam’s Raymond – Bravo
Hugh Grant’s Fletcher – Gamma
Colin Farrell’s Coach – Sigma
with various stolid Delta henchmen
I see it as a film about male dynamics and loyalty, and a man’s own standards of masculinity and virtue – their own sense of what it is to be a “gentleman”. The etymology of gentle:
early 13c., gentile, gentle “well-born, of noble rank or family,” from Old French gentil/jentil “high-born, worthy, noble, of good family; courageous, valiant; fine, good, fair” (11c., in Modern French “nice, graceful, pleasing; fine, pretty”) and directly from Latin gentilis “of the same family or clan,” in Medieval Latin “of noble or good birth,” from gens (genitive gentis) “race, clan,” from root of gignere “beget,” from PIE root *gene- “to give birth, beget,” from PIE root *gene- “give birth, beget,” with derivatives referring to procreation and familial and tribal groups.
There is a sense here, both in the social climber Michael Pearson, and in Colin Farrell’s Coach, that through loyalty and consistent deeds of power a man can create his own tribe, his own belonging – it is this which Raymond instinctively senses and acts within, and Fletcher or the upstart Asian gangster Dry Eye would regard as foolish outdated nonsense. The film is, in this sense, a very old-fashioned and even honourable work – even as it is chaotically modern and degenerate.
Remainders 