cvairag

When few people we're talking about Nightcrawler, a film that was somewhat initially buried by its release date, I was lamenting that this masterpiece (one of the few American films that have banged my bells in the past decade) barely took home any hardware, while overpriced, badly acted and directed mediocrities were being regularly feted. Well, since the advent of 'fake news' as political jargon that's all changed as the streamers and the dvd crowd has caught up with a film not as shocking to me in its content, but in its level of excellence in almost every category of film making. Needless to say, Gyllenhaal's noted performance represents the ne plus ultra portrait of the conflicted antagonist as protagonist, no easy feat. The guy is simply one of the best players of his generation, and yet, still remains somehow a bit under the radar, perhaps because he is far more artist than celebrity, unlike others, too numerous to mention. What does disturb me still however is what I consider to be a general misunderstanding, on the part of the United States of Amnesia's filmgoing public to what the film is really about. First, I do not see Nightcrawler as a psychological study. It is a crime film. But who's buying this stuff? The public. What Nighcrawler is theme wise is an on point dissection of the horrors of unregulated capitalism and the misguided ethos of of the one-dimensional desperate quest for profit (subsistence in the environment of radically inflated cost of living) as they spill down to the millennial generation through the internet, which becomes almost a character in the narrative, at once Lou's mentor and his alter-ego - like Lear's Fool leading him onto increasingly further depths of depravity in the wasteland of the world of the L.A. night. After all, this is what it takes to establish a successful business, from scratch no less, is it not? In what is in many opinions the state of the art in scripts, this message is entirely driven home by the subtext in a tale that becomes considerably more than the taut specimen of L.A. Film Noir it presents itself as. Both understated and over-the-top, Nightcrawler deals with some of our most firmly entrenched and divisive social problems at a time when the fabric of our society is severely threatened and does not flinch in its facility for speaking truth to power. A great film, when there are few worth watching.

The late 1940's through the early 1950's, imo, were the very best years for cinema. Before the demise of the big screen, the distilling influence of t.v., the necessity for big budgets - the mandatory interference with the art by folks who really do not belong in the creative process - casting directors, tyrannical studio v.p.'s, credit-jumpers, tabloid paparazzi, the right wing politicizing of lew wasserman and the hollywood blacklisters - particularly in small countries like Sweeden and Japan - one could still create art on the screen in a simple, unvarnished, moving way. Like Kurusawa's magnificent Ikiru filmed around the same time, Summer With Monika is simply one of Bergman's best, and upon many years of reflection, more memorable for me than Persona, Skammen, or other more highly touted, more complex Bergman masterpieces. Though not without idiosyncracies and flaws, the film maybe Bergman's definitive investigation of a question that haunts many of his later undertakings - what is at the root of (god forbid me for saying it) the feminine mystique? Bergman's answer: In the words of no less an expert on the eternal misery of women than Dr. Laura Schlessinger (sans her deplorable politics): "... low or no self-esteem".

The idyllic utterly illusory Edenic summer romance played out in in the last vestiges of an innocence which cannot live in the workaday world, brilliantly, by the gorgeous couple, Lars Ekborg (Harry) and Harriet Andersson (Monika - was there ever a more sensually provocative heroine filmed on screen - and note: entirely without makeup, hollywood diet/workout routine, or skin shop quick fix-it?) is as graphic a peek at Eve's primal first bite as we will ever have in post-modern consciousness. What Arthur Miller (also around this time) termed 'the tragedy of the common man', a homage to the pathos of our eternal suffering, in a provincial romance epic proportion and real, filmed on a shoestring budget, von de seele. By all means see it, one of the great masterpieces of that great era for film, the early fifties. It'll move you.

My favorite film of 2015 - by far. The concerns two ethno-biological investigative journeys into the deep Amazon - by an European and an American at the beginning and end of the twentieth century. Ironically, they are guided to their destinations by the same shaman, the surviving member of his tribe, at both ends of his life. A film which says, if not all, a lot about our own culture and the impasse which industrialized society has reached. I particularly enjoyed the filmmakers' attempt to reach beyond material explanations in their analysis og what our world has become and our relation to it as individuals. Best of all, filmed in glorious black and white.