Naked Desire (2015)

a.k.a. Onanie Sister Tagiru Nikutsubo

Director: Hideo Sakaki

Screenplay: Kôichi Miwa

Cast: Ui Mita as Akane Kanzaki; Shô Nishino as Kayoko Fukuya; Yasuyo Shiba as Rina Sendô; Shigeru Harihara as Kanzaburô Yamanami; Yûta Kogiri as Shinji Okada; Tadashi Mizuno as Kensuke Saitô; Matarô Umeya as Shigeyuki Kimura; Ayumi Tomiyama as Junko Machioka; Kôichi Miwa as Tejima

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

I wish I could appreciate Naked Desire, but in lieu to Japanese pinku cinema's history, there's still a lot of films which are just for titillation, something that Jasper Sharp, author of Behind the Pink Curtain can attest to; he wrote in that incredible text of how this medium of softcore sex films, on low budgets, allowed for such openness in creativity directors like Kōji Wakamatsu instead made controversial and political films, but he also attested to the many that have been forgotten on the wayside.

This is pertinent as, early in their DVD releases, Redemption Films were releasing some fascinating titles, many of which belong to the "The Four Heavenly Kings of Pink", four pinku directors (Kazuhiro Sano, Hisayasu Sato, Toshiki Sato and Takahisa Zeze) who started in the late eighties and imploded the genre with innovative work, and other figures who followed after them who took the material into more introspective creativity. Films like Tokyo X Erotica (1999) are very idiosyncratic, but it seems that sadly, barring a few fascinating choices I want to visit, Redemption Film's choices have sadly slid into sex films which don't live up to their potential, an utter shame as the British company for a long time (before they focused as much on the US market) did a lot of admirable things, such as their Jean Rollin releases to even debuting Valarie and Her Weekend of Wonders (1970) on DVD in the UK, all in spite of their utterly cheesy Satanic lesbian vampire aesthetic.

Whilst the prospect of ultra-love budget sex dramas sets in one main house at the coast could've led to so much interesting creativity, Naked Desire just decided to go for sex sells in odd ways. It's particularly an annoying case as the material is there; pinku's reputation is that even if you aren't dealing with highly cerebral work, there could be a wit or even fun to the material, as seen when The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (2003) became an unexpected cult hit in the West for its many aspects including George Dubya Bush's finger being an unexpected plot point.

The set-up here in Naked Desire is interesting as a premise for a film. A Catholic nun, reminding one of Christianity being a small but historically distinct aspect of Japan, is tending to an old man who is debilitated, a fascinating detail waiting to be used that during the sixties he was a political protester back even at the 1960 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan that caused incredible outcry. Her life is effected by three abrupt guests - one a self-proclaimed nymphomaniac and a free spirit, the other two a female teacher with her young boy lover on the lam from the police, who are hunting them down presuming he's been kidnapped by her. The later pair are a controversial and potential icky choice but considering how pinku has the ability to tackle serious material there's a lot to unpack that could've worked - the chaste nun having to deal with openly sexual figures and how it effects her own sexual desires; the free spirit taking a very controversial stance of the treatment of the nun's patient; and the teacher and student, clearly in love, trying to find their safe spot away from the lives they've left whilst the younger boyfriend is discovering his various fetishes, particularly with his buttocks being fondled.

The set up presents a lot to go with - even with the problematic items at hand, with the addition that the free spirit believes the best way to help the old ailing man is through sex, even when he is not entirely aware of his surroundings, if Naked Desire had been openly transgressive with a purpose it would've at least been interest even if still uncomfortable. Even if it had been a comedy, it could've done a John Waters and deliberately been bad taste. The issue is that, for its moments, Naked Desire feels like a lazy production. The work is incredibly simplistic and flat in telling its tale, following the barest essentials.

I wasn't expecting a vast complex psychodrama of a nun's temptations, but a bit of nuisance about her faith crossing with sexuality should've have reached a point rather than the actress, visibly merely a cosplay outfit at points, masturbating in front of a crucifix in a darkened bare room, which really isn't inspiring and too limp to even consider blasphemous. Even the troubling takes on comforting a disabled old man sexually, or the young student, can be dealt with through far more than the film attempts, frankly half hearted. Even the involvement of side characters doesn't help; the student's male friend, a letch who'll betray his romance behind his back, is unused. As is the two male detectives and female officer sent after him and the teacher. The male cops are the worst part of the film, unfunny and boorish with a bad taste creative choice of them groping the female detective constantly; she in contrast, even here, is at least someone who could've been taken in an interesting direction just if it meant more scenes of her beating up male perverts. That and the quirk of a scene of her masturbating to porn in the office only to wonder whether the actress looks like herself.

Twice already, I've referenced masturbating and far from shame, it's more that there's a clinical lack of pleasure even in a childish way. Probably the biggest failure is that Naked Desire isn't even sexy in a crass way, just purely mechanical. It's a factor to take away from Sharp's book that, for every work his praised to the hilt, he devoted an entire chapter to even how pinku cinema when it slumps crashes badly in the worst. To try to review a sex scene is frankly arbitrary as, in truth, it neither elates nor provokes, merely causes a shrug of the shoulders, something no actor or actress willing to bare themselves even for simulated sex should end up with.

Naked Desire isn't terrible but you'd feel embarrassed to recommend it, which is a shame as, even for work less put together as this film, I have a growing fondness for how formats like video and digital camera recording technology, as well as allowing more people to create films, has produced its own world of infinite possibilities. Rather than use digital camera for big budget films over celluloid, digital should be the place for tiny films which with limited sets, even if I must confuse that the transfer for Naked Desire, for its UK DVD, has one of the worst looking appearances even viewed on an old TV on an old Blu-Ray player up scaling it.

It doesn't deny that, barring some different locations, a film moistly set at a large coastal home, by the beach, which becomes the heated environment of a predominantly female driven cast of characters, with sex and passion bottled up, allows for many tantalising dramatic possibilities, forced to have to improvise a film here over seventy minutes or so with only what one has. Sadly we don't get this, even with the options laid on the table of what to do with three female characters, two proudly sexual and the other conflicted by her duties and desires, with the two males (one wheelchair bond, the other young and naive) offering a minimal budgeted pot-boiler you could work with. Even if meant to be a comedy, intermingling this with erotica, drama and religious existentialism even in a cheesy way would've have been worth it, an enticement with "limited" and "no-budget" filmmaking that, even if the acting and technical quality were to question, you still have resourcefulness and unpredictability. You get predictability here unfortunately, only changing into something memorable in the finale.

It's impossible to forget. The old man suddenly, awoken by the police outside his home triggering his memories of being a protestor, suddenly turns into Yukio Mishima during his fatale attempt at a coup d'état in 1970, shouting like a mad man whilst possessing a lot of "power" between his thighs. Two male characters decide to have sex, in probably the most progressive moment of the whole film as, rather than for comedy, it's seen as two guys regardless of sexuality finding themselves enjoying jumping each other on the kitchen floor. And the female cast, naked, posing on the outside of a car which, even if moving slowly, is still impressive in allowing themselves to be in such a position on a moving vehicle (and probably freezing as it doesn't look like the scene was filmed on a hot day). At least I could leave this bad film with something memorable; the rest however doesn't compensate for anything you've had to sit through, or the moments of crass attitude to the female characters, or the lack of reward.

History Lessons (1972)

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Directors: Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub

Screenplay: Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub

Based on a novel by Bertolt Brecht

Cast: Gottfried Bold as Der Bankier; Johann Unterpertinger as Der Bauer; Henri Ludwigg as Der Anwalt; Carl Vaillant as Der Dichter; Benedikt Zulauf as Der Junge Mann

Back with the Straub-Huillet connection and there's a sense, for every film so far that has succeed, there's examples like History Lesson which I am becoming fonder of in ambition, which is an odd pleasant sentiment to use for intentional didactic avant-garde cinema, but with the realisation that I would've done things slightly different if I could make these films, always a little detail which yet a huge construction flaw when amplified. Their structuralised forms don't always succeed as, in all due honesty, to completely remove a sense of sensation from a cinematic work, interest or/and emotional resonance, is to completely undercut one's work, a vast difference between challenging the viewer and a disconnect that loses most, and it's a shame here as the material, an unfinished Bertolt Brecht novel about a biographer of Julius Caesar being confounded by contrasting opinions, has so much that for the duo perfectly works in lieu of their political attitudes.

Like Othon (1970), ancient Rome reflects than then-modern day, and even today revisiting this film from the now past, as we have Julius Caesar turned into an unseen Charles Foster Kane figure, a being of power and stature who various Romans interviewed by a biographer tell differing versions of. From a banker to a former soldier who now lives in a hut in the countryside, these figures are all in period dress but being interviewed by a younger man who wears a suit and drives around the then-modern Rome in a car, the interview scenes inter-spliced between lengthy driving scenes that somewhat (a little) evoke Chris Petit's Radio On (1979) in slow contemplation of the driver dashboard and everything outside the front window.

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The problem begins in how entirely didactic History Lessons is, reminiscent to the issue between Jean-Luc Godard, who I once hated but have come to admire as an innovator, and the infamous Dziga-Vertov Group era of his career, where he renounced mainstream cinema and even his original experimental art films, and made entirely didactic films which History Lessons shares the same lengthy monotone dialogue sequences from, off-putting when there's a disembodiment to the material within them from the felt disinterest. This is worst as, even with this mute extreme Bressonian acting style, History Lessons (where four length dialogues exist in-between the driving scenes) is actually fascinating in its material, the four different views of Caesar between the military hero to conniving exploiter who worked for merely profit and for power, pertinently in an anecdote where he was captured by pirates, working with them and still had them executed after making a deal with them. It is fascinating text, more so as with modern Italy as the location there as juxtaposition, the timelessness of political powers and its many issues shining among the environments. Another issue is that, with knowledge that the source material had the biographer go through an existential crisis when he couldn't get an agreement on Caesar, I could've had more participation of the character even if he's still a neutral figure deliberately for the viewer to enter the story through. Again, it raises the issue of disconnect as such a character, even paper thin, is designed for the viewer to enter the film which the film itself belies in its obstructions.

The driving scenes, quiet and meditative, offer a calming form of slow cinema and are more successful, paradoxically more enticing as, if you can enter their tone, we see documentary footage effectively of Roman as the car passes along, camera in the back seat so we follow the vehicle along and watch outside the window. Bustling, crowded with cars, old women blocking the street and forcing the car to have to reverse, these scenes of Italian streets is strangely pleasant and somewhat amusing in very dried humour.

The issue though, again, is that the film puts forward a pointless structural tone, especially as with patience, the film can be understood and rewarding whilst still retaining the reason Straub-Huillet deliberately choose these problematic creative choices, of purposely removing an sentiment that might obfuscate their message in "cinematic" terms. Not Reconciled (1965), one of their most well known films, is an accomplished piece of art, compiling a dense plot into merely fifty minutes and yet not pointlessly obtuse, instead when watched repeatedly growing in weight as you understand what is going on. History Lessons however is like Orthon, which made sense (Ancient Roman drama in modern Rome) but made the mistake of mute acting for no distinct justification. Again, here, vastly different from Robert Bresson and Roberto Rossellini where muted acting was for clarity of meaning, one little aspect scuppers a perfectly sound construct.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Minimalist

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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Hukkle (2002)

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Director: György Pálfi

Screenplay: György Pálfi

[SPOILERS THROUGHOUT]

As the most prominent figure of Hukkle, its befitting one of the first images we begin with is an old man, his face a tapestry of age, hiccupping on a wooden bench outside, intercut with a geese trying to eat by sliding its head through a fence. A rickety bench, it wobbles as ants scatter underneath, as predominant as he is rather than isolated background features. Thus Hukkle, the debut of underrated director György Pálfi, begins...

We rightly celebrate the cinema of Eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia had a rich heritage of great films, with Slovakia as a separate country now rightly claiming the films shot in its borders as its own, and the now Czeck Republic still creating distinct films. Poland has a legendary history as equal to it in cinema, as does Russia. Estonia is growing in interest, new film films like November (2017) creating a unique language of their own, and we know Romanian cinema well around the world. We must not forget either countries from the region with their own histories of cinema - Ukraine, Lithuania, Slovakia, Serbia and Montenegro etc. - or even a country like Bulgaria who, unfortunately, are more well known for straight-to-video films being shot there when American based locations aren't available, rather than their own cinematic heritage¹.  Hungary, the subject of today's feature, is a huge influence on this movement of Eastern European cinema, but we are in danger of forgotten sons and daughters being forgotten from the recent decades who have contributed to innovating and unique cinema.

One such figure is György Pálfi, whose reputation comes from the notorious Taxidermia (2006), a triptych of three decades of Hungarian culture which is slightly revolting. However most of his career, sadly smaller than I wish it was, is unavailable; I can understand a film like Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen (2012) being a nightmare to release, as it creates a new film from pre-existing copyrighted material from major classics, but you also have Hukkle, film as pure audio-visual spectacle following a small Hungarian rural town. No musical score until the end credits, no dialogue in the slightest until one of the last scenes (where the plot revelation explaining everything is sung at a wedding), but entirely filled with the diegetic sounds of nature, rural life and fine culinary arts.

The plot is very simple if you piece the narrative fragments together - that the women in the village are poisoning the men with belladonna liquid provided by an elderly woman. To those who want it to remind a surprise, I'll obscure the narrative and only mention in easily readable text the fact that people (all men) are abruptly dying in the town for suspicious reasons, all whilst Pálfi shows us the natural and rural world that weaves around this scenario and human society in their own world.

It is slow, meditative cinema except that the director/writer belongs to a type of filmmaker from the 1990s but especially the 2000s who broke down art cinema into a level of unpredictability that could even win over cult film fans and, growing up in the 2000s and slowly getting interested in the reviews of these films from 2005 onwards, made these filmmakers with their more controversial films (like Taxidermia) get emphasis in mainstream British film magazines like Total Film. Beyond this however there is a greater sense with someone like Pálfi of all the tools and influences of cinema being at hand, comparable to idiosyncratic Hungarian filmmakers who came around the same time like Kornél Mundruczó, who can take a superhero origin plot with a realistic drama and make Jupiter's Moon (2017), or even Nimrod Antal, who did get lost in Hollywood but qualifies for his debut Kontroll (2004), which is a surreal murder mystery set within the Hungarian subways. The kind of film Hukkle is means Pálfi constantly shows you new layers to this world, between the contemplation of meals being made to the perspective of a mole under the soil, the creature's perspective one of many alongside countless other animals and insects we see. Then, randomly, an airplane flies close to the ground in a shot that I'm still trying to grasp, or we even see an x-ray of a character eating food, witnessing it go down the gullet with tension in a shot that does show the few moments where the CGI has dated but doesn't dampen the ambition.

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As a result, with little dialogue at all, you experience the film in sound, in the mood, in the images, but here is a whole world that gleefully amuses in crudeness as well as entices with beautiful images, men playing a game of bowls suddenly cut to an extreme close-up of a hog's bulbous wobbling testicles, belonging to a stud walked by his owner down the road to impregnate other peoples' sows. The worlds of animals is that as vivid as ours, their voices as vivid and distinct in the soundtrack between various insects (ladybird on a girl's ear buds for a music player), birds, amphibians (a frog swimming before its unfortunate demise by trout), and mammals who all pass each other occasionally but other times live outside each other and human society in its nefarious Midsomer Murders level of body count and suspense.

The story, if you are eagle eyed (or know your botany), can be pieced together with ease, and can be seen to be precisely built up, but Hukkle without any spoken dialogue doesn't speak in exposition in the slightest, instead telling this tale in the world of ordinary life between cooking, interaction, work in a sewing factory, police cars having to reverse down a road to allow farming equipment to move along, and various moments between intentional laughs and fascinating vignettes of ordinary life in human and animal life. Arguably, the film is an avant-garde production but that doesn't negate immersion, rather than forcing one's attention to abstraction filling it with details which we have a terrible tendency in mainstream cinema in negating the importance of, and how it's all captivating when spotlighted on. Certainly, for those who are easily hungry, the amount of cooking in this film is bound to have an effect on foodies, which I haven't exaggerated for comic effect.

The humour is found, a black sense of humour which is found throughout in the cutaways and tone, our hiccupping old man the one person Greek chorus who merely looks on at the world around him in peace, even having the post-end credits sequence happy in his own world. The reference to Midsomer Murders might go over the heads of my non-British readers but are poignant here; imagine a British Sunday night television drama that has lasted many seasons, always following murder mysteries within a rural community, middle class rather than Hukkle's working class, with so much murder taking place in just one episode the population would've been at negative, evoking as much Hot Fuzz (2007) without the action scenes. Hukkle would've been a detective mystery, only with a cop who seemingly has a mullet under his uniform hat, were it not the fact György Pálfi is interested in the natural ecosystem to co-exists within such a tale, and the ordinary humdrum life that would not be depicted in a show like Midsomer Murders, even the jokes like the reversing cop car shot in long shot sideways down a country road. Even the mystery is a banal one, stemming ultimately from folk culture with a dark smirk to what it is entirely about.

Helping is the Hukkle is less than eighty minutes, containing a fully fleshed out plot with this style fully felt and immersive, so it manages never to have too little or feels pointlessly padded. It proved a great start for Pálfi who, with Taxidermia as his follow up, effectively continued his obsession with Hungarian culture but definately ramped out the crass humour and even blacker humour, this offending the masses. Sadly, after that film, he's become obscure. That's an absolute shame as revisiting a film as Hukkle enforces how the innovations of Eastern European cinema were still strong into the Millennium onwards.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

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1) Not to insult straight-to-video genre films shot in Bulgaria. It just sad, how as Canada is used to represent American cities, like being forced to dress up as the metaphorical girlfriend/boyfriend unavailable and more longed after than the location used itself.

In Fabric (2018)

Director: Peter Strickland

Screenplay: Peter Strickland

Cast: Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Sheila; Hayley Squires as Babs; Leo Bill as Reg Speaks; Gwendoline Christie as Gwen; Julian Barratt as Stash; Steve Oram as Clive; Barry Adamson as Zach; Jaygann Ayeh as Vince; Richard Bremmer as Mr. Lundy; Terry Bird as Bananas Brian; Fatma Mohamed as Miss Luckmoore; Sidse Babett Knudsen as Jill; Fatma Mohamed as Miss Luckmoore

[Some Spoilers Throughout]

Peter Strickland returns, and I can confidently say, baring an interesting tangent to watch filming a Bjork concert, he's qualified as an auteur now. Thankfully he's the definition I feel an auteur should be - distinct style, obsessions, and most importantly a sense even if he was a working director more than someone with control over his work that any genre or type of film in his hands will still feel like his work, where every film I wait for is as distinct and worthy of dissection as the last. That said, even if arguably the same Strickland world of The Duke of Burgundy (2014), which was strange enough, he's somehow topped himself and made In Fabric weirder. It was apt I went to a subtitled cinema screening by accident as, not only did it help appreciate the nuisance of Fatma Mohamed's dialogue, as a female Nosferatu shop assistant, or the nuisances of washing machine maintenance technical speak, but it fit a film that can be best described as legitimately surreal already.

In Fabric is fascinating already as, presuming it was set in the past because of the fashion, the late sixties to mid-seventies in hauntology and nice cloth wear, the characters and their scenarios are of the modern day. Strickland is openly indebted to his influences - Euro horror and erotica between Jess Franco and Jean Rollin - but exactly as with Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, he isn't an imitator, instead taking these aesthetics and creating new art from them. In this case, the premise was of a cursed dress, but I couldn't help but have my own interpretation of the film being as much his satire about the modern day, between horror and comedy, of not only consumerism but even the malaise of neo-liberalism of morality and social behaviour turned into a series of banal, ever present spectres.

The dress, bold crimson red and likely vampiric, has multiple owners as, in a twist of the plotting structure, this film is actually of two halves. The first is with Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a divorced older woman, her son Vince (Jaygann Ayeh) a young adult dating a much older woman (Gwendoline Christie) with his own kinks, who buys the dress for a lonely hearts date. The dress is naturally alive and evil, but the story is as much her life and the dress store of origin. Sheila's own life though is also that of disconnect from her son and, in lieu to my theory, a bank job where (with Julian Barratt and Steve Oram as am ambiguous couple and her scene stealing managers) one is reprimanded just for taking too long for bathroom breaks and there is a leaflet for a proper hand shake. Even without the creepy clothing store with hypnotic ads and a tubing system rather than a cash machine, she lives in a strange and suffocating world of deadened existence, emphases by the second half introducing the characters of washing machine repair man Reg Speaks (Leo Bill) and his fiancée Babs (Hayley Squires), emphasising an empathy for these two working class characters as, with Sheila's tale being more serious horror and their's a pure kitchen sink farce, everything around them is just sinister and/or part of what is revealed to be a reality bending conspiracy.

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Comedy has been seeping further into Strickland's career from Berbarian Sound Studio (2012), his debut Katalin Varga (2009) (an art house take on a rape revenge film shot and set in Romania) the other anomaly in hindsight. I wasn't expected it, however, to be as pronounced as it is in In Fabric, probably emphasising the curious tangents somehow as well, despite being only a fifteen certificate in the UK, how far we can push explicit sexual references as long as you just hint the literal flying semen and not where it comes from, the aforementioned scene managing to be kinkier and weirder than more "extreme" films involving a fetish for mannequins. Legitimately funny, deadpan humour surfaces throughout the film, never compromising the legitimately haunting sequences, making curious bedfellows however made for each other.

Sex and the subterranean in desires is a huge part of the film in general, the entire story with an entire air of absolute strangeness that stands out even in Strickland's filmography. The difficult, strained relationship between Sheila and Vince's girlfriend Gwen; the whole quasi-gothic nature of the clothing store with bleeding (?!) mannequins; the intentional humour; even that Julian Barratt and Steve Oram have a rack of Edwardian period costumes just in their meeting room, meant to be there for them to encourage people to wear them with them (even for hand shake practice to make "it easier") for some obscure obsession. I nearly forgot to mention the dream sequences for this film, where Barratt and Oram's characters are obsessed with asking people about their dreams, leading to two, one more haunting, and the other involving a birthing that is batshit bizarre. 

Aesthetically as well, Strickland pushes himself further, as his first film actually set in Britain, openly embraces what has been called the "Hauntology" idea of cultural haunting of British seventies pop entertainment and culture but dragged into the modern day. Synth, very comfy and innocuous aesthetic styles, photos and images of the time period researched from archives (even those in Sheffield, the city I had to go to so I couldsee the film), as well as a score from Cavern of Anti-Matter who, considering among the instruments they used include "twigs" as well as obscure electronic equipment, is at times playful and others utterly alien to the 2010s and any other time period for that material. Between everyone working on the film and all you see as well, the film emphasises how British Peter Strickland is - in that, as we expected a horror tale about a dress, which he delivered, I found myself watching a film deliberately going off into tangents, becoming surreal, including locations like a charity shop or a stag party, which are very British idiosyncrasies, intermingling with the clear influences taken from European cinema and its lurid underbelly.

And it's unpredictable in the best ways, challenging in the sudden second act switch which undercuts the viewer's predictions or how, in the end, the climax is a massive riot in the clothes store rather than the slow burn supernatural story we were originally presented with. Thankfully as well this never undercuts its premise into something predictable, the red dress a diabolical entity never turned into a banal creation in a lot of boring horror, but something else as (according to the ending reveal) its shown to be a parasitic entity who devours and claims souls constantly, all with intentions of continuing. And it's a weird film. Very weird and for the better.

Abstract Spectrum: Abstract/Grotesque/Mindbender/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

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Surviving Edged Weapons (1988)

Director: Dennis Anderson

Screenplay: John W. Randle

Cast: Mickey Dawes; Leo T. Gaje Jr.; Dean Gilmore; Kathleen A. Handal; Robert Henke; Dan Inosanto; Gary Klugiewicz; Jan Lewis; Richard Menzel; Kevin Parsons; James Phillips; Ronald Rolland as the Narrator

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

It has been such a long time waiting to see Surviving Edged Weapons which is, yes, an instructional video for the police, produced in Milwaukee in Wisconsin, about the dangers of knife attacks. The reason, however, this film has been slowly developing a little cult, even deserving an even wider access, is that if you have to point to an instructional video to represent this medium, there's nothing else quite like Surviving Edged Weapons in existence. Over a feature length it has real emotionally sobering honesty about the harm knives can cause, including real images I have to warn of before anyone goes watching the film, eighties USA hysteria over crime, and pure madness. Never, dear reader, would you think an instructional video on knife injury would begin in prehistoric time with cavemen (actors in costume and fake wigs) shanking each other. Yes, you still take this subject seriously, the film not shying away from the trauma and injury the police officer testimonies talk of, but the director and production had ambition, and literally through the Dawn of humankind, with Leonard Nimoy approved voice over, to no budget action film set pieces they keep the viewer on the edge of their seats in the bizarre content on display.

Because of these details, and those yet talked of, the experience is complex in watching Surviving Edged Weapons, difficult at times to sit through due to its content. Suffice to say, all the real material can be gruesome (close ups of real wounds including of the dead), shocking (real footage of an Asian country where a man slashes multiple people at a crowd gathering), dumbfounding (a fork managing to be shoved DEEP into a chest), and sad (the testimonies, especially the last which ends the film with a male police officer in tears). Where the infamy comes is in the recreations, between director Dennis Anderson having clear ambitions of spectacle and some utterly nonsensical creative choices. In anticipating the unexpected, this envisions a cop knocking on a door with a warrant only for the disturbed home owner to be sat dishevelled on a chair with a broadsword near the door, one which does get used. A knife blade is attached to a petrol tank cap and razors are suggested as being attached to baseball caps as if a common threat. In the section later on teaching you how to scan and monitor an environment for danger with an acronym, the film of all things has cops bursting in on a woman conducting a Satanic ritual, Iron Maiden poster on the wall to add to the eighties paranoia with Satanic panic, as if it's a normal trial for the American police at the time.

Even when the hypothesized scenes aren't as out there, there are many details to consider. The director clearly wanted to make crime films one day, even on an instructional video budget trying here, so even if it's tentatively about the virtue of keeping cover, the film spices this important message by depicting it through cops raiding a drug bust straight out of a straight-to-video action movie. Some of this material, mind, is legitimately fascinating - moments like how, if a police officer is severely wounded, they control the situation and help themselves through stab wounds - but other times you bask in the rich Milwaukee accents, and witness the over-the-top-scenarios and moments of pure cheese.

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Obviously, as an instructional video, the notion of "entertainment" is very subjective. It is informative, if visibly laced in scare tactics - in this world, many people carry more than one knife on their person at all times, or have a broadsword, or in the most abrupt wig splitting scene possible, a butch muscle guy can appear at a domestic dispute with a cleaver abruptly. The film extrapolates various ridiculous if still nasty looking improvised weapons, even in a driving license. Hysteria is felt, from the abrupt satanic ritual to how prevalent knives as a dangerous weapon can be. Yet the point of an instruction film like this is to protect its officers and it gets into some legitimately poignant ideas. Complacency, putting yourself at risk as an officer by not fully checking a bystander or preventing someone getting a drop on you, is a very big and significant aspect of the film it deserves praise for emphasising.

Whilst the scene can be comical, the various versions of a stabbing where the distance between an officer and a criminal is constantly increased, until the point an officer can safely unsheathe their gun and prevent themselves from being stabbed, is interesting to watch¹ as the film, for all its farce, does talk about the messiness of a real fight, and depicts it, in a way for more realistic and of importance to depict than any action film. (Horror as well as, including a shot of horror VHS tapes like Halloween (1978), rather than going into hysteria over violent films the video instead refutes the idea of the stereotypical way a knife if used in slasher films, front downward stabs, in favour of real life blade related violence being chaotic and liable to slash and attack any part of a bystander or police officer's body). It's also important in emphasising how dangerous merely an inch of a sharpened object can be, even an improvised blade in context able to main and even kill someone if an individual isn't prepared. We may find it funny during a scene that someone caught speeding threatens an officer in full thick Wisconsin accent, but it is apt to recognise anyone might argue back in such a situation, wave (as this person does) as something as tiny as the blade on a Swiss Army Knife, and have to be dealt with safely. Said actor, who plays various other roles, also relates the real incident where his face was splayed open by a knife as was "flapping in the wind", requiring surgery as a result; even if his out-of-blue exclamation of such events being "all over sports fans" is colourful he utters it with full sincerity directly to the camera as someone speaking from true trauma.

And I feel that avoids the potentially gross offense to view Surviving Edged Weapons ironically. Its moments where real death or injury are depicted, like a more morally conscious Faces of Death (1978), are uncomfortable, revulsion found in some of the weapons improvised like the fork mentioned paragraphs earlier, whilst the scene of a real incident at an Asian public event is used for emphasis, within seconds, in how multiple people can be harmed immediately if someone is allowed to attack without being prevented to. There is a sense, uncomfortably timed, of how I have watched Surviving Edged Weapons in the midst of a huge increase in knife crimes within England in the late 2010s, especially among teenagers with many tragic deaths. I will not trivialise this concern, that has been talked of in media and even had Donald Trump tweet about it, but considering how serious the film takes its subject, it does feels like a sobering reminder that, whilst there is humour and dated material here, the instructional video feels prescient in the need for its existence, even a version to exist for teaching the public nowadays.

The reason we can laugh is that, with knowledge director Dennis Anderson and everyone on board the production was creating an arguably noble and morally righteous work, everyone involved should be thanked for this work regardless. We can laugh because, separate from the serious material which is treated seriously, they made a film which starts with cavemen; that it has abrupt cameos of Satanists; that it has unintentional comical exaggeration; it has men running at officers with machetes or the narrator blankly mentioning the term of a "martial arts yell". Even the real life examples, like a man throwing pieces of glass at officers off his room, with knowledge no one was harmed, show the absurdity that can take place in these incidents but unlike the fictitious ones come as a reminder of how the unpredictable can happen and should be prepared for. So, yes, entertainment is here but so is an informative document, a historical object of real interest, and a sombre rumination of these issues. The emotions will vary violently throughout as a result, but it becomes better as a result.

From https://i.imgur.com/y97jsaPh.jpg

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1) This "21 foot rule", which is part of what is called the Tueller Drill, teaches an individual to recognize and react to an approaching threat crossing a set distance of 21 feet. It's to be debated but, having been the influence for the video to include this as a major sequence, it's a rule which (in its various interpretations) is of great interest as an outsider to law enforcement to learn of especially as its be apparent subject to debate too. Even if there are many variables which could undermine the specific nature of the rules, its point to also influence a person's judgement and reaction time to a threat is still a credit to its existence. Teaching about "situational awareness", its importance for helping American law enforcement in protecting itself is of interest, and probably would be of benefit, modified, for a bystander to protect himself or herself from such a threat. Hell, if Mythbusters effectively tackled this rule when they tackled the famous phrase "never bring a knife to a gun fight", ideas to ask about how to safely deal with a threat carrying a knife will be worth discussing even if with many revisions.

Othon (1970)

From https://acmi.s3.amazonaws.com/media/thumbs
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a.k.a. Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times, or, Perhaps One Day Rome Will Allow Herself to Choose in Her Turn

Directors: Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet

Based on the stage play by Pierre Corneille

Cast: Adriano Aprà as Othon; Anne Brumagne as Plautine; Ennio Lauricella as Galba; Olimpia Carlisi as Camille; Anthony Pensabene as Vinius; Jean-Marie Straub as Lucus (as Jubarite Semaran); Jean-Claude Biette as Martian

With Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet again, we have here a legitimately difficult film, an adaptation of a stage play by Pierre Corneille set in Ancient Rome, a series of political and romantic strafes set within the short-lived rule of Emperor Galba, in which ambitious senator Othon finds himself next in line in the power, his mind distracted by being unable to love the woman he desires, who has been forced into the arms of the infamous Roman Emperor Nero. Two young women, Camille, Galba's niece, and Plautine, daughter of the senator Vinius, are in love with Othon. Unfortunately a series of manipulations and power plays will everyone dissatisfied or corrupted, particularly as Lacus (co-director Jean-Marie Straub) wants to keep Orthon in power, and Plautine's father Vinius is trying to manipulate Orthon for his and his daughter's sake even if it means sacrificing both his daughter and Camille.

All that is witnessed is intentionally set as having universal illusions to the follies of people - emphasised as whilst the cast are actors in appropriate dress, they're filmed in regular Italian environments of the time, right in front of backgrounds of cars and streets below, immediately jarring and creating an effect on the viewer. The initial scenes on a hill overlooking the metropolis behind these characters, far from comical, actually have a great effect in showing these characters existing in a timeless state, like ghosts, whose ancestors would keep finding themselves in these scenarios regardless of time and dress.

From http://store.grasshopperfilm.com/mm5/
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Orthon, for me, is an artistic failure but with not want of ambition, an admirable attempt at breaking audience connection with the work to pieces and rebuilding the relationship. Orthon is dense - even next to Robert Bresson's minimalist (and amateur-cast) performances, the dialogue is quickly spoken here, even hastily spoken at a rapid fire, bluntly with little emotion, with the added factor that Danièle Huillet was interest in having the subtitles drop out of purpose which has continued on past her death in Orthon's screenings, leaving (in the version I saw) entirely un-translated scenes. It is almost all minimally shot, though tracking shots of the cast walking around do occasionally happen and stand out artistically as we follow their lengthy conversation in motion. There is also, unintentionally funny at times but also possibly an intentional influence from (of such unexpected a place) Straub's love of directors like Ernst Lubitsch and Charlie Chaplin, a tendency in the midst of long scenes for new participants to abruptly appear on camera as if they have waiting in the wings patiently, a technique that I have to confess is a distinct and creating style you would have to consider using as here rather than abruptly allow to take place. Again, despite the directors' reputation for sternness through the tone of Orthon, it still has a precise style. This is more so as, later on, the locations leave the city panoramas to within woodland, by old fountains, and locations which feel closer to these Ancient Romans even if jarring to our perceived image of them.

The issue is that, the cast always stood still or sat still, you need to engage the viewer even if you desire to obfuscate and/or frustrate them, or the art is pointless. This is another film from these creators which needed to be rewatched, which does help clarify the drama, but unlike Not Reconciled (1965), which innovated in narrative presentation, Orthon especially on another viewing feels pointlessly obtuse. There is no real sense of gain for them from being this flat, rather than minimal, when Robert Bresson's style lead to a stripping away of artifice to find real emotion. Orthon's visual style is still standing out, deliberately contrasting period drama to the then-modern day, but the issue for me is that, whilst a strange suggestion, so much of the cast is just sat or stood around when there should have been minimal drama just from some more movement or some attachment to the material beyond what is seen. Instead, the experience is like watching living statues with a lack of specific reason for their placement.

Again, I view Orthon as a noble failure, as it's a concept which I see the intention of, the universal nature of its drama not dissimilar to the modern day, the juxtaposition infesting to me too. Even the drops in subtitles, like Jean-Luc Godard's later 2010s work, force the viewer to focus on those you do have onscreen and the images when the text vanishes. The structural ideas meant to obfuscate the viewer actually focus one's attention, leading you to avoid the usual habit, which afflicts even me with some films, of drifting off in other thoughts and keeping one alert to properly engage with the material. The stiffness of the performances, however, feel inappropriate, especially as films like Not Reconciled have gained so much more from a minimal but still emotionally engaging acting style that suited Straub-Huillet and still kept to their desire to clearly strip it of all contrived heightened emotion. One little flaw is enough to mar a great concept with Orthon as a result.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Minimalist

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

From https://jojud265nia2bj9sy4ah9b61-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/
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The Brown Bunny (2003)

From https://posteritati.com/posters/000/000/
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Director: Vincent Gallo

Screenplay: Vincent Gallo

Cast: Vincent Gallo as Bud Clay; Chloë Sevigny as Daisy; Cheryl Tiegs as Lilly; Elizabeth Blake as Rose; Anna Vareschi as Violet; Mary Morasky as Mrs. Lemon

The Brown Bunny...a very banal title, actually in reference to a pet rabbit the main female character had, this figure the obsession of motorcycle racer Bud Clay (Vincent Gallo) who only materialises as Chloë Sevigny near the end but instead becomes a spectre hanging around this existential, slow cinema mystery. The term "Brown Bunny" however, if referenced amongst knowledgeable cineastes, evokes one of the most infamous premieres at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival where the second directorial feature of character actor Vincent Gallo played. Gallo is someone who has always come across as deliberately annoying or offending people on purpose, rather than a lot more problematic figures in cinema history who have actually done absolutely despicable things or sincerely say offensive ideas under the guise they sincerely believe in them. If "shit stirring" every got into the English dictionary, Vincent Gallo's portrait should be sat next to the definition just in lieu to how the fallout to The Brown Bunny screening went, between the apparent caterwauling and boos from critics, to the ongoing trading of barbed witticisms between Gallo and the late film critic Roger Ebert.

Question is, did The Brown Bunny have any actual merit beyond the controversy, stemming from the notorious ending sequence involving explicit (real) oral sex,and what does one reflect upon when you revisit the film a decade plus after its buzz of notoriety?

The immediate issue with that answer is that, well, ninety percent of the film is incredibly minimal almost experimental (if not experimental) cinema which is entirely on mood, and eventually is dependent on that finale to work. Aware the notorious Cannes cut was originally around two hours, having thirty minutes trimmed away in places like the opening race, a lot of The Brown Bunny is Gallo in character driving around various locations in numerous US states, a cross between Chris Petit's 1979 minimalist road movie Radio On, right down to vignettes with characters the protagonist encounters, with an extreme interpretation of Michelangelo Antonioni, befitting as set in the US and a desert at one point this immediately evokes Zabriskie Point (1970) if the Italian maestro had gutted all the free love and counterculture symbolism of that film.

Of actual praise, on the get go, is that The Brown Bunny is at least incredibly well made with a distinctive style, really emphasising the bold creativity of American independent cinema even into the 2000s. Gallo shot the film in 16mm and as a result, with every shot looking like it was sun kissed, the grainy images created are absolutely enticing. In the malaise the entire film is, a languid pace of minimal dialogue and that which is there through Gallo being very quiet onscreen, it would be easy to block out how much of the American landscape is also used, from the urban to the rural, from motorways to suburbia, or how appropriately melancholic and effective the soundtrack choices are, particularly the country songs.

From https://assets.mubi.com/images/notebook/
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Gallo, in spite of his reputation and notoriety back at this time, which including (whether serious or not) rumours of him wanting to sell his own semen or bigger controversies of him saying offensive comments, had a fascinating career as a character actor. He's not been helped by his bluntness or his lack of filter in his comments, which has imbued accusations of being an utter egotist. Yet you look at his filmography and its fascinating - he has been with Claire Denis in her English/bilingual films with the exception of High Life (2018), like Trouble Every Day (2001); he made an impression in Emir Kusturica's American film Arizona Dreams (1993) just for the scene where he recreates the crop-duster sequence from North By Northwest (1959) onstage; or his interesting turn in Tetro (2009), one of Francis Ford Coppola's "experimental" films. He is also in The Brown Bunny, for any accusations of ego onscreen or how uncomfortable the finale scenes are, incredibly quiet and even isolated in terms of how he plays the character of Bud Clay, to the point of extreme introversion that few director-writer-actors would willingly want to portray. Even if introversion can be egotistical, a woo-is-me aura that could accidentally be created or unconscious, Gallo's scenes with the few character interactions with his mumbling and guardedness are so distinct especially when little of the film is with any "action" or "scenario" that the mood tempers this potential issue.

The content of the first three-quarters is entirely minimalistic - starting with the aforementioned scene of Gallo racing, and spending his time drifting across the country aimlessly. He shuns most contact, as with the case of passing various female sex workers on the street, or acts in a difficult strained way, asking the last of the former he meets to just follow him about before he abruptly changes his mind. A character called Daisy (Chloë Sevigny) is for the most part an off-screen figure, known only through her elderly parents and the titular bunny. It's slow, at times exasperating, yet its intentionally a mood piece, coincidentally running current to a trend in Gus Van Sant's filmography of a similar style, between Gerry (2002) and Paranoid Park (2007), of a similar obfuscation and emphasis on mood. The exact slow pace of time is felt according to regular time outside of cinema in The Brown Bunny, the emotion more found in that aforementioned score. Also in lieu to where the film ultimately leads to, a tragedy that haunts the lead, The Brown Bunny ultimately is a film structured on this trauma and only wraps together coherently depending on its reveal.

[Major Spoiler Warning]

Of course, the denouement is notorious for, when Daisy finally appears, an explicit sex scene including actual oral that riled up many*. It was a huge risk for Chloë Sevigny, as an actress with a considerable stature at the time of the film, where a huge distinction is still made between actresses in cinema and actresses who star in adult films where real sex takes place; even those films which have real sex that aren't in the adult genre, it is still a tendency of non-actors or unknowns, as Canadian broadcaster Sook-Yin Lee found when, staring in Shortbus (2006), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation considered firing her for that film's real sex scenes she participated in until fans and celebrities criticised them. Thankfully, having talked about this film in the last few years, Chloë Sevigny not only has no regrets about The Brown Bunny, saying the scene was done with care for her concerns, but also, as an actress I have always liked, she's never been out of work.

It's also an uncomfortable sequence because Gallo's character starts using misogynistic language in the midst of it, with violence felt within the scene, but its revealed as the damaged trauma of a boyfriend who lost his girlfriend (and unborn child) in the midst of a part where she was gang raped, a literal phantom as he ends up curled up in the foetal position in that room.

[Spoilers End]

The finale, when all the reasons behind Gallo's character acting his way is revealed, is abrupt, never brought up as little premonitions in the film before, and all a sudden jolt after the trance of before. Does it work? Entirely subjective, but Gallo's at least trying a very complex characterisation. Any accusations of ego is also undercut by how much of the film he (even if unintentional) comes off as vulnerable and disconnected from his environment; and in lieu to the revelation, he builds and argubly justifies why the film is structured as it is. Its, from then on, where it is subjective; a lot of the notoriety and anger at Cannes, the crowds there at a drop of a pin to jeer an unconventional film by all accounts, just comes from how extremely glacial the initial cut probably was and, yeah, the whole issue of depicting real sex in cinema with two known actors. In truth, with the layer of subjectivity that can be a virtue and a flaw with American independent cinema, it's so open to interpretation you the viewer are forced to think about The Brown Bunny long afterwards. No wonder Gallo took his ball home after the welcome he got, whether you agree with this review or hate the film - he only made one other film after this at this point in his career, Promises Written in Water (2010), which he screened at the Venice Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival, but purposely hasn't released it since.

Abstract Spectrum: Minimalistic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

From http://motorcycleboy.fr/wp-content/uploads/
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The Spirit (2008)

From https://i.pinimg.com/originals/26/36/14/
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Director: Frank Miller

Screenplay: Frank Miller

Based on the comic book series created by Will Eisner

Cast: Gabriel Macht as Denny Colt/The Spirit; Samuel L. Jackson as The Octopus; Scarlett Johansson as Silken Floss; Eva Mendes as Sand Saref; Sarah Paulson as Ellen Dolan; Stana Katic as Morgenstern; Louis Lombardi as Phobos, Logos, Pathos, Ethos, Bulbos, Huevos and Rancheros, Mangos, Adios and Amigos, etc.; Jaime King as Lorelei Rox; Paz Vega as Plaster of Paris

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

If American comic books were more value for money, like Japanese manga, or I could afford them I'd read more of this medium. I'd naturally scan the obscurer and idiosyncratic creations in the superhero genre rather than Spider Man and Superman - the failures, the cult heroes, the acclaimed work like Alan Moore's run of Swamp Thing, and significant figures of history deserving more eyes like Will Eisner's The Spirit. Annoyingly, Eisner's acclaimed creation is less available then his later era rejuvenation into a graphic novel writer, Eisner's legacy including the Eisner Award existing named after him as the standard of great comic book/graphic novel work based as much on his transformation into the likes of A Contract with God (1978) as it has been the man in the forties who created Denny Colt, The Spirit, and leap genres on those pages in a single bond. I have an unfortunate gut feeling, whilst this review isn't going to go down the route expected for the notorious adaptation by fellow graphic novel creator Frank Miller, that the 2008 adaptation of The Spirit for the cinema and its failure has left a spectre still needing to be exorcised.

The Spirit is no way near as bad as its reputation suggests, but let's not kid ourselves either that we have a film that is both all over the place but in this curious position of not being weird enough, inappropriately strange, and a mess. It does feel like the first film in a director's career, as I have always viewed his co-directing with Robert Rodriguez of Sin City (2005), based on his own comic series, was a faithful (even panel to screen transition) adaptation where the author was there more to bring it to life with his thoughts, a very different type of work than taking another creator's work and making an entirely new story for film from it. Using dominantly green screen as with Sin City, Miller does have a lot of room for improvisation, but he chooses directions that, for obvious reasons, raised many questions.

We will get to Samuel L. Jackson, as the villain the Octopus and beholder of some of the stranger creative choices, proclaiming toilets are funny and such things, later but the immediate curiosity with The Spirit is that its tonally scatterbrained, between Gabriel Macht as the hero speaking very sombre Miller style monologues of his true mistress being the city itself, against incredibly silly slapstick humour like The Spirit  losing his trousers down to his ankles in the midst of escaping a perilous drop off the side of a building, all with the Octopus (alongside Scarlett Johansson as Octopus' henchwoman) being played off as comedic villains from the get-go, what with their cloned minions (all played by Louis Lombardi) who are complete idiots wearing pun based black t-shirts. I see how, in a comic book, the passage of time would be clearer - for a film, where time is told different, the results here are hectic in its tonal shifts.

The humour itself is also not particularly funny, just perplexing in how odd it gets. You find yourself with a one scene kooky French sword fetishist called Plaster of Paris for one scene, in a skimpy Parisian belly dancer costume walking bare feet (and nearly bare) in the snow, having just skewered the Spirit on a whim, and you are wondering the hell was meant with the character. You don't get enough time to as ingest this as you immediately find The Spirit on death's door, his apparent immortality with limits as Death herself Lorelei (Jaime King) looks to claim him. Seriously, between this and the abrupt melting of a cat named Muffy a scene earlier, you don't get time to digest this material before another out of place joke or odd change appears.

And yes, let's go back to Muffy, as that's the scene that really encapsulates the issues and curiosities of The Spirit, at its most distilled. The one in which the Octopus, Samuel L. Jackson, is in full Nazi officer uniform among other details. The character, by all accounts, was an unseen figure whose name literally described a phantom whose tentacles were a metaphor for his control of the metropolis. Jackson, frankly, whilst he tries feels innately strained, a buffoon rather than menacing between his absurd costume changes (like samurai leisure wear) and obsession with eggs, neither feeling like a completely weird figure and pushing the absurdity further, in vast contrast to Johansson who, as the real brains of the operations, stands better out as a glib straight woman who just enjoys her work. Yes, Jackson in Nazi uniform is incredibly uncomfortable in imagining what was going on in his head during the take - thought I wondered more for Johansson, who is of Jewish descent, also in costume and at one point in front of a portrait of Hitler - though it's a scene where I don't think its Frank Miller being offensive but trying to be weird on purpose, a cack-handed attempt which misses the mark between this, Muffy appearing only to buy the farm, Plaster of Paris and admittedly one good idea in the film, that against a hero who regenerates chopping The Spirit up into little pieces and posting them separately in the mail might be effective against what is effectively an undead revenant.

From https://movies-b26f.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Spirit.jpg

Where it does have the right tone, and why I cannot fully damn The Spirit, is when the tone is a gee whiz old pulp one. It leans heavily on the Sin City aesthetic, but its heart's clearly to an older, slightly silly type of pulp in which everything is meant to be a lark, emphasised as the plot McGuffin, alongside the Golden Fleece of Jason being discovered, being that of Hercules' blood which has been kept in a horn for millennia and can offer immortal strength. It's meant to be a bit over-the-top, somewhat saucy and making a deal that Denny Colt, whilst a good guy and a hero, has a wandering eye which is played to with some credible attempt alongside the character of nurse Ellen Dolan (Sarah Paulson), daughter of the police detective who helps the Spirit whenever he is harmed but, in love with him, has to put up with his constant womanising, more so as an old childhood friend has returned as Eva Mendes.  Even if the plot is predictable, I see what Frank Miller was after with these scenes.

Yet he decides, abruptly, to have Colt enter monologues of exposition to himself (to us? To the cat that keeps following him around?), which even when I can accept the transitions between serious protector of the city and a doofus do feel jarring. There's also the cheesecake, which I'd have to deal with as Miller is at least obsessed with Mendes' figure and dresses most of the female cast in very revealing costumes, even diving costumes with strategically unzipped areas. Frankly, Miller's other work could reveal more problematic content, but in what I have read (Daredevil, even Sin City with its obvious issue of sex workers and femme fatales in armed fetish wear) the man still comes off as a saint next to the unfortunate and more objectionable issues with gender politics in American comic books, the lesser of two evils for good and for worst between the "woman in the refrigerator" concept spun from the frequent horrible death of female side characters to extremer body dysmorphic inducing character designs. The issue for me with The Spirit is that Miller comes off as being more juvenile than sexist, with all the issues that beholds.

And I saw this again knowing the late 2000s was when a backlash was seemingly brewing against Frank Miller, emphasised by The Spirit's box office and critical failure by a major marker of this string of events starting the era, vastly contrasting the love for the cinematic adaptation of Sin City and the surprise box office success of Miller adaptation 300 (2006) was. Even with a minimal reading knowledge of Miller, I know enough he is a talented creator, seen in his drawings on the end credits reinterpreting The Spirit character, and the various issues that came about in the 2000s seem like a series of waves that at the same time suddenly made him a man out of step of time - Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001-2) which became a divisive follow up to The Dark Knight Returns (1986); All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder (2005-8), which may be as terrible as everyone says it is, but made "I'm the goddamn Batman!" a meme; the entirety of his negative views of Occupy Wall Street, which as someone who has entirely rejected both conservative and liberal sides, comes off more as petty arguing between sides; the belated, insanely late sequel to the first Sin City film in 2014, and its failure, where I still scratch my head, after the success of the first film, as to why it took so long to be green lit when the chance was clearly gone; the entire controversy around Holy Terror (2011), originally meant to be Batman versus Islamic terrorists until he had to create original characters, probably as offensive as its reputation suggests, but in mind that he regrets the work in the current day, seeing that it came from a huge swelling of extreme emotion and anger after 9/11 that, whilst still problematic, left a lot of spiritual injury on the USA that unfortunately led to a lot of ill advised ideas like that one. Suffice to say, unlike an Alan Moore or a Grant Morrison, a string of events like this didn't Miller bulletproof into the current day.

The Spirit at times does show this sense of being out of step, or at least a first time director biting too hard in ambition in terms of this jumble of genres and strangeness, something which Miller seems to deliberately play to as his own cameo is that of an older, gawky police officer. When he does focus, you get a moment like, falling to the bottom of a harbour, Colt floating pass the giant heads of all the women in his life rather than his life flashing before his, which is by far more artistically credible than from any of the Marvel Universe films I have seen. When the film is entirely riffing on old forties pulp, like its source material, what with Gabriel Macht playing the heroic but somewhat naive chad, The Spirit does actually start to have good humour and a sense of where it is going, and as much as the aesthetic of Sin City (comic and film) of monochrome with colour is superior, with more emphasis on the style rather than misguided comic beats, this almost sepia style would've worked.

Ultimately, it's a fascinating failure. It's not deserving of its reputation next to some utterly tedious superhero films over the years, but with honesty that it's not held highly for all its curious little mistakes for a very good reason. It really instead falls into my fascination for oddities, those films I don't necessarily defend but strangely find myself falling back to because they are so much more interesting in what they offer about their creators, as people rather than film makers, rather than a bland highly acclaimed work where the creator seems a blank slate.

From https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/c
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