Braguino (2017)

 

Fifty-one minute documentary. A Russian family lives in the taiga (south of the tundra, north of the steppe) in eastern Siberia. In the vast expanse of wilderness, hundreds of miles from the nearest town, they moved in right next to another family that had done the same thing. 

 

Two families living right next to each other in primitive conditions who hate each other and want to be alone might make a pretty good western, but not much happens here.

There was a documentary about a similar situation, The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden (2013). There are three small German households on an otherwise uninhabited island in the 1930's. They hate each other and apparently start murdering each other, but there was no way to prove it. 

Nothing that dramatic happens here. We see the patriarch shooting ducks. The children plucking them was surprisingly ghastly. I fast forwarded when they started butchering a bear they killed. And a helicopter lands with some wealthy, belligerent, heavily armed hunters. 

The families do have radios, satellite phones, flashlights and boats with motors on them and they care about their personal appearance for some reason.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless celebrating 61 years

Briefly, from Jeffrey St. Clair on Counterpunch.com:

Jean Seberg in a letter to a friend back in California, while filming Breathless: “I’m in the midst of this French film and it’s a long, absolutely insane experience–no lights, no makeup, no sound! Only one good thing–it’s so un-Hollywood I’ve become completely unselfconscious.”

They said it was the movie's 50th anniversary, but they must have meant 60th and it's really the 61st, isn't it?

And I don't know if this is true, but I'd like it to be:

It’s now pretty clear that Godard didn’t know what he was doing technically when he made Breathless. And didn’t care. And not caring made all of the difference…

This is Not a Test (1962)

The cop was really a jackass. Late at night on a two lane road in the desert, a deputy gets a message. He blocks the road. Barks orders at the drivers he stops. There may be a nuclear attack. He thinks the trailer of a truck will serve as a fallout shelter.

I saw this movie in the middle of the night when I was thirteen or fourteen. I thought the cop was an idiot for smashing all the bottles of liquor. You'd think it might be useful medically after the apocalypse.

The film is public domain. I watched it on Pub-D-Hub although it's available elsewhere including YouTube. You could do a remake, one where they kill the cop so they can die in peace.

72 minutes. 

Freud: The Secret Passion (John Huston, 1962)

Montgomery Clift in the title role. Set early in Freud's career. Psychiatrists back then discovered they could help patients overcome symptoms of PTSD by putting them under hypnosis and having them recount the traumatic events that caused it. In one scene, a young woman (Susannah York) has partial hysterical blindness. Under hypnosis, she relives an incident where she had to identify her father's body. Her vision is instantly restored.

These same techniques among others were used on soldiers suffering "combat fatigue" or PTSD during World War Two. I haven't seen it, but, John Huston made a documentary about this in 1946 when he was still in the Army Signal Corps. The film, Let There Be Light, was suppressed by the government until the 1980's.

Freud was made the same year as The Manchurian Candidate. Both movies had sequences of patients under hypnosis, showing first a distorted version of events, then again showing the identical events as they really appeared. The patient makes the first Freudian slip, confusing "protestant" and "prostitute".

With David McCallum, two years before The Man From U.N.C.L.E., as a patient who unnerves Freud by giving him his first brush with an Oedipus Complex.

I had seen Freud on TV a couple of times decades ago. I was impressed by it and wondered why I hadn't seen it again in so long. It's available now on the Criterion Channel which is featuring the films of John Huston.

Matt Damon possibly less dumb than we thought a minute ago

Well. Okay.

But in a statement to Variety, Damon said that he has never used the word in his “personal life” and does not “use slurs of any kind.” He also affirmed that he understands why the interview “led many to assume the worst.”

“During a recent interview, I recalled a discussion I had with my daughter where I attempted to contextualize for her the progress that has been made – though by no means completed – since I was growing up in Boston and, as a child, heard the word ‘f*g’ used on the street before I knew what it even referred to,” Damon said in the statement. “I explained that that word was used constantly and casually and was even a line of dialogue in a movie of mine as recently as 2003; she in turn expressed incredulity that there could ever have been a time where that word was used unthinkingly. To my admiration and pride, she was extremely articulate about the extent to which that word would have been painful to someone in the LGBTQ+ community regardless of how culturally normalized it was. I not only agreed with her but thrilled at her passion, values and desire for social justice.

“I have never called anyone ‘f****t’ in my personal life and this conversation with my daughter was not a personal awakening. I do not use slurs of any kind,” Damon continued. “I have learned that eradicating prejudice requires active movement toward justice rather than finding passive comfort in imagining myself ‘one of the good guys’. And given that open hostility against the LGBTQ+ community is still not uncommon, I understand why my statement led many to assume the worst. To be as clear as I can be, I stand with the LGBTQ+ community.”

 

I guess if you believe someone's dumb enough to tell an interviewer that he went around calling people that, you'd also have to believe he was dumb enough to tell an innocuous anecdote so badly that he gave everyone the wrong impression.

 

If Damon didn't keep saying stupid things, people might have been slower to jump on this. They might at least have been a little surprised. 

And finally this from indiwire:

Damon emphatically stresses his support for the LGBTQ community, but he does a disservice to himself (and those he aims to appease) by denying ever using the word. In his carefully worded statement, he seems to be implying that since he has never “called anyone” the slur in his “personal life,” he is above reproach. He then directly denies using slurs of any kind, despite having only just admitted to saying it in the August 1 Times interview.

(He also says it in this GQ interview from 2007, while discussing what he and Affleck did with the “Good Will Hunting” money. “We knew it would just be so gay to get the same car. And our friends were making fun of us. Like, ‘You fags, what are you doing,” Damon said.)

 

50-year-old Harvard boy Matt Damon even dumber than we thought

I'm rather astonished. I knew Matt Damon was a jackass. Turns out that, up until a few months ago, he's been in the habit of referring to gay men as "fags" or "faggots", I'm not sure which because he now rather prissily calls it "the f-slur". His daughter had to tell him to knock it off. He argued with her that it was funny because he said it a movie.

It's one thing after another with him. 

As a member of the press, I like when celebrities talk to the press, but it's always illuminating to hear the stories that folks like Liam Neeson or Matt Damon think are humanizing and charming, but actually reveal insulation and isolation (among other unsavory stuff) instead.

--Daniel Feinberg on Twitter

The Truth about Romance (UK, 2013)

It's a bad, bad sign when the main character in a movie made by a film student says that Star Wars is his favorite movie.

Reportedly made for less than $300, which is odd since the filmmaker seemed to be from a wealthy family. I assume these scenes were filmed in his parents' home, but it was about characters in their 20's who all lived in expensive new houses and they made it clear that they didn't live with their parents. 

[Okay, I was wrong. According to the guy's blog, the house belonged to the parents of the girlfriend of an actor. They planned to use a more modest residence but that fell through. The filmmaker was out of film school and living hand to mouth. Even if he weren't, couldn't I just be happy for him?]

After five years, an English guy is finally going to tell his female friend his repressed English feelings for her. The girl drops by his mansion and tells him she's heading for a new job in Paris.

Depressed, he instantly strikes up a relationship with a young woman on a park bench.

They hang around. Talk a lot. They go for a walk in the country and later steal someone's boat. It made the English countryside look pretty good.

It's amazing what you can do for three hundred dollars. 

I would have forgiven anything if the guy had lived in a "bedsit".

Free on Pub-D-Hub.