35: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, Steven Spielberg)

Owned version: The two-disc DVD released by Dreamworks in 2002.

Acquired: In 2002, from a used bin at a Blockbuster.

Seen before?: Three times before this. Once during its original theatrical run in 2001, most likely on July 1st, and twice from this DVD - on July 2nd, 2018 and on March 8th, 2010. (The latter led to this review, and as is now par for the course a glance over that piece makes me wonder why I thought I was any good at this whole writing thing back then.)

It's funny how the Dr. Know scene has always been my least favorite piece of the film - Williams' faux-German vocal mugging as the bouncy cartoon search engine never quite seems to fit with the rest of the film, not even amongst the searing garishness of Rouge City - yet this time around, it strikes me as the skeleton key to the whole endeavor. As robot boy David and smooth sexbot Gigolo Joe try to work around the multiple potential meanings of words so as to find the precise question that will bring forth the answer to David's Blue Fairy conundrum, they get at the heart of the story's tension regarding dual natures and shifting contexts - appropriate given the film's existence as a collaborative work between two of the 20th century's great artists.

The ability to exist in two distinct states within one object, even if - especially if - those states conflict is all over this. It's seen on the macro level through the nature of David, the little robot boy who wishes to become human, and by film's end does - indeed, the driving action is on one level David's search for the Blue Fairy and on another level David's slow, painful progress towards humanity. David starts as a shell, a pure machine running on programming without emotion; once his "mother" Monica activates his imprinting protocol and thus fires up his emotional circuits, the bulk of the film is then David's journey out of the safety of the home into the big bad world. This physical journey doubles as a gradual enlightening, a march through various emotional achievements until his final ascendance into full humanity via the embracing of mortality. And, until this very last moment, David is always defined by both the amount of humanity and the amount of mechanization he carries within him. The latter is always emphasized at the expense of the former - even the evolved robots at the end of the film define him as One of Them, a more primitive version but Them nonetheless, while also seeing him as a bridge to the world of the human, a world they were never present to witness - but David feels the former acutely and uses it as, essentially, his self-definition, produced via aspiration in absence of legitimacy. He's not "human," strictly, but he feels and thinks as acts as one. At what point does the artificial intelligence stop being artificial?

But in the period before that question is allowed to hang, David is a robot. Unquestionably a robot. In this space of the film, this film that is among the best Spielberg has ever made, exists the finest of fine work - the period before David's imprinting is spectacular, creepy, beautiful, unsettling and altogether perfect, maybe the most spine-tingling evocation of living with a new life this side of Eraserhead. In this early segment, Spielberg does his best to play up David's mechanical unnaturalness - in shots like the one where his face is refracted through a beveled closet door, or the God's eye shot of him at the dinner table, isolated in the frame from his "parents" by a large circular hanging lamp, or in beats like the payoff to the hide-and-seek gag where it's cut like a jump scare, this might as well be a horror film with David as the monster. Yet what he's doing is explicable in context; he's absorbing the world around him dispassionately but with an insatiable curiosity much in the vein of any young child, and if the extraordinary dinner table scene culminates in another horror-worthy sting - the barking forced laugh - isn't this essentially the logic of a child, thinking that Mommy and Daddy react positively when I laugh? And if we were to invert that emotional reaction into crying, wouldn't its inexplicability, its welling-up completely without an observable inciting incident, seem completely normal for a baby, which is the basic plane of logic David is working on at that point?

Another important beat in this early segment expands the idea of duality outside of David, as a precursor to where it ends up - there's a scene shortly after David comes to live with Monica and Henry where he's observing framed family photos, and he ends on a picture of Martin, their comatose young son whose absence David is meant to soothe. We see David's reflection in each photo he comes across, and his image seems to merge with Martin's in the final photo, emphasizing his status as an overlay, an inadequate Band-Aid stretched across raw throbbing pain. But there's something else there - David's ghostly reflection mirrors Martin's own state as a ghost within his own life. Martin is neither alive nor dead; he's instead in a place where he's both, denying his parents the ability to properly grieve even in the face of hopeless odds, which leads to rash but understandable decisions like Henry's acceptance of his company's request to test out the David robot or Monica's leap of faith when she puts forth the imprinting protocol. Duality strikes again. (There's also something to be said for replacing a boy who can't wake up with one that can't sleep.)

Once Martin does wake up, David's days in the household are numbered - a machine, even one that's bonded to you, is going to lose when the choice is between it and your flesh-and-blood progeny - and that's when the notion of duality and contrast becomes weaponized. Once David is left in the woods by Monica, Spielberg changes from shooting him as the monster to shooting the world as the monster, overwhelming and hostile and uncaring. Where David's guilelessness marked him as inhuman pre-imprinting, it merely casts him as an innocent once things get dangerous, and the mutability of that is the point - the light in which an action can feel justified can easily shift and reveal the action as less than (e.g. the climax of the Flesh Fair, the incident that turns Gigolo Joe into a runaway ["You killed me first."]). I do mean "light" literally in at least one sense, inasmuch as the rising moon, normally a benign sight, turns out to be a harbinger of genocide, and how after that every moment of threat or destruction is prefaced by a pale blue light similar to that of the Flesh Fair abduction craft. (A nice change of pace from the typical "red = danger," methinks.) It's in the film's harrowing midsection that David's innocence is most played up - a literal babe in the woods - and it's meant as a contrast to human cruelty, an impulse that David is not capable of at that point; when, in his search for answers, he encounters a threat that is less physical and more existential, he proves that he can also be violent and cruel, that's another marker on his progress towards being human. And then he gets to meet his maker (Gigolo Joe: "The ones who made us are always looking for the ones who made them.") and have his illusions shattered. Osment's performance in this is eerily good, pantheon-level work from a prepubescent, and the quivering, broken way he delivers, "I thought I was one of a kind," is possibly the best choice in a performance full of great choices. That William Hurt's Professor Hobby reveals the circumstances of David's creation makes him not so removed from Martin after all is another telling flourish. (God so loved the world that he gave to it his only begotten Son, right?)

The midsection really cranks up the cruelty and short-sightedness assumed of humanity, and no one could be forgiven for thinking that a cynical position on Spielberg's part. But beyond this outsized horror being needed as one end of a pole to balance the purity of David's quest on the other end as well as serving as a model for David's eventual behavior in Professor Hobby's office, I feel the cruelty serves as a misdirect of sorts, a big ugly manhole cover for the subterranean tunneling Spielberg is quietly setting up in the film's ending (one Kubrick himself admitted he could never quite get to to work the way he wanted it to). What's important when dealing with the human world here, I submit, is not the grand gestures of fear and anger but the small ones of kindness and empathy. When the advanced robots at the end tell David, "We only want for your happiness. You've had so little of that," it's a truthful sentiment but it's also a quiet watchword - within the shit and horror and chaos of modern life, there's still moments where we can be good to each other. We see it in a big way at the end of the Flesh Fair, when the crowd rejects the ringmaster's call to melt a little boy to death. We also see it in the bit where a hotel clerk warns Gigolo Joe about the Flesh Fair being in town, in Monica choosing the lesser of two evils when casting David to his fate knowing how difficult it will be to do so ("I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the world" is an all-timer of a heart-ripping line of dialogue), in Gigolo Joe rescuing David from his despondent dive into the ocean. And we see it early on, before David even comes into the narrative, in the fairy-tale figures that have been plastered onto the walls of the ICU ward where Martin is being held in suspended animation. It's a tiny, mostly futile gesture, but it stills smacks of the best possible version of humanity, one that tries in any way to bring a sliver of light to even the most agonized places. The use of those figures also presages David's ultimate encounter with the Blue Fairy in the submerged Coney Island, and both times the appearance of fairy-tale characters heralds the delayed granting of a long-held wish, an impossible dream as a bulwark against misery magically made real. Martin wasn't supposed to wake up but did. David wasn't supposed to become human but did. Why wouldn't a machine aspire to be part of a species that could maintain hope in the face of everything that says it isn't worth it?

34: Adventures on the New Frontier (1961, Richard Leacock & Albert Maysles & D.A. Pennebaker & Kenneth Stilson)

Owned version: The 2016 Blu-ray released by Criterion under the heading of The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates - a fascinating set of short films.

Acquired: This past July 4th at a Barnes & Noble as part of their semi-annual Criterion half-off sale. Seemed appropriate.

Seen before?: Once from this disc on the July 4th in question.

Part of me just wants to write just, like, "wow, so refreshing to watch a president being presidential!" and move on, but snark is only one tool in the box and overreliance on it can rot the soul. Besides, this film and its predecessor Primary make an impressive case study in how to critique a subject without overtly appearing to do so. While I plan (obviously, given the nature of what I'm doing here) to write at length about Primary down the road, I'll briefly note now that what struck me about it is how quietly but firmly the filmmakers aligned themselves with Humphrey over Kennedy without harming the project - indeed, the thrust of the film seems to demand Kennedy's triumph even as, during filming, it would have not been a foregone conclusion. It's a piece about the evolution of political campaigning in this country, and while Kennedy had issues and platforms he ran on and talked about at length, Drew and company hold that close until the final push towards primary day. They're more interested with his presence, his image and the near-messianic reaction he got from crowds, as opposed to poor Hubert Humphrey who's mostly seen doing old-school legwork for small groups in North Wisconsin farm country and greeting potential voters individually - the "man of the people" versus a man who seems to exist above the people, in a rarefied and inspiring space of his own. If we take that as the truth, Adventures on the New Frontier follows from there into the realities of JFK's ascent to governmental Godhood. It's easy to be inspiring; it's damned hard to be effective.

It's not just important, in the context of this project that you know about this difficulty. The filmmakers want you to feel it, to understand it in a bone-deep way. Adventures sets the stage for this in its opening minutes, with it first following JFK from behind, as though the camera were tethered to his neck - a newsman literally following the story before him as he walks down the halls of power. When the narrator says, "Now you will begin to move with the President," the double meaning of "move with" jumps out - that we are following the President as he goes about his day, and that we move as he moves, step as he steps, swing our limbs as he does... in essence, that we are forced into an identification with the President as he transitions from Great New Hope into, y'know, the actual fucking President. And, thanks to the miracle of then-modern access reporting, you will get to be in on that transition too! Given the thesis, it's then telling about the nature of the job and funny in a vacuum that we see much less of JFK than would be expected. While this is an act of media-blitz burnishment, made because JFK liked the work done on Primary, it prints the legend not by making its central figure seem godlike and perfect but by making him a regular dude with an irregular job, the white-collar boss of an office building full of diligent workers whose product is the fate of billions. He can sit in the Oval Office and smoke cigars and discuss, in calm and rational tones, a plan for nuclear disarmament as though there's nothing unusual about that, that he isn't discussing weapons that could vaporize entire populations in seconds, because that's the job. And because that's the job, it's not the sort of thing a man can do by himself.

So in addition to popping into the Oval Office to see JFK do things like create the Peace Corps, we follow Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg as he testifies to Congress about the weak economy and the plans to get things rolling, especially in grossly depressed places like the coal country of West Virginia, where unemployment is over twice the national average. (Coal country: dead now, dead then.) We jump to Puritan, a small coal-centric village in WV to see what damage this downturn hath wrought. And we follow Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs G. Mennen Williams as he prepares for, and ultimately attends a conference in Addis Ababa regarding the emergence of several newly independent states and a general push towards African self-governance. In following Goldberg and Williams, there emerges a clear interest in the space between stated policy and real-world application, between rhetoric and efficacy. I find the many ways in which the filmmakers pointedly use irony and contrast to drive home this idea that words and intentions are easy but action is much tougher. The most pointed example of this is likely a spirited bit of narration that concludes with, "The president is looking ahead," which had been preceded by an interlude in which a young Puritan boy hopes to get a shirt from a government-sponsored donation drive and is then followed by more testimony about the dire nature of the economy by Goldberg; meanwhile, Williams's preparation for his trip involves him discussing his diplomatic aims with Barrett O'Hara, the chairman of the subcommittee on Africa who boasts that he has been to the continent all of twice, and with Louisiana Senator Allen J. Ellender, who had been to 38 African countries that year alone and gets off the amazing line, "Anyone with common sense knows you can't raise chickens in a rain forest." This echoes further when a member of the African coalition at the conference states, "American opinion... was somewhat parochial before." Through it all remains a portrait of a flawed machine made up of men working towards something bigger than themselves, stumbling towards a sort of optimistic future and hoping the path they're on will get them there, working through disagreements of approach and policy via a shared understanding that this job is fucking impossible but equally fucking necessary. When the narrator speaks of JFK and "decisions he must make alone," well, that's another irony for you, since we see that no decision exists in a vacuum here. This is the kind of myth-making I can get behind.

(Retrospect also offers a look at a quieter form of myth-making that would have been unknown to all but the President's closest - check the stiff gait and tight-shouldered posture on JFK around the 18 or 19 minute mark and reflect that we know now about the panoply of ailments afflicting a man who was always sold as an acme of youthful vigor.)

33: Abduction of an American Playgirl (1975, no director credited)

Owned version: The DVD released by Vinegar Syndrome in 2014 as a kick-off to their Peekarama porno-double-feature line

Acquired: From Vinegar Syndrome this past Black Friday after the trailer caught my interest.

Seen before?: No.

The title and general knowledge of the evolution of the genre around this point foster expectations that this, like its discmate Winter Heat, will be a grimy, soul-killing wallow in rape-fantasy porn. The opening moments, where two downtrodden dudes (mustachioed Fred and his friend Will) looking to score decide on a whim to spirit away Jackie, a fashionable young woman in a tight chartreuse dress they spy walking out of a local grocery, seem ready to fulfill that promise.

That goes out the window almost immediately afterward during the abduction promised in the title, when the playgirl in question gets a good kick to the nuts in on Fred and he staggers around uselessly while Will awkwardly drags the woman into the back of their car. It's that kind of movie, the kind that would be queasy were its male protagonists not hapless dorks with grievous overestimations of their station and permanent "KICK ME" signs pasted on their backs by life and fate. There's nothing at all threatening about these jamooks; Will, the dopier of the two, turns getting the boots off the unconscious woman into an IKEA-level exercise in mechanical frustration,  while Fred gets flustered instantly and leaves the room when their prisoner starts weeping ("What the hell ya cryin' for... cryin' turns me off!"). They can't even get on the same wavelength when trying to stretch this situation out into a harebrained kidnapping scheme - Fred gives instructions to Will about what to say, ignoring his friend's repeated cries that he hasn't a dime to make the call.

So, they're total buffoons. Laying this groundwork, the film then presents its central joke: in avoiding one rape fantasy, it curiously flips inside out into another, one where two stereotypically-cocksure '70s males find themselves at the mercy of their literally insatiable object of their desire. (To put a button on it, Fred gets to yell, "She raped me!" after he's tied to a coffee table by Jackie.) It's essentially the only joke the film has, as it repeats multiple variations on Jackie fixing breakfast for the two and telling them, above their exhausted protests, to be in the bedroom in ten minutes, but it unexpectedly gets a fair amount of mileage out of that joke. (Best variation: the double-team that runs at double speed and is overlayed with a piano-centric silent-movie-style score - call it slapstick-and-tickle.) It is, in fact, when the film wholly uses up its two hapless cockswains that it loses its bearings; not having its central duo to beat into the ground, it then settles for a brief bit of lesbian incest and an indulging of the Virile Black Man stereotype that leads first to a punchline that can be seen from space, then a mild gay-panic joke as a topper. (Though it is interesting and appropriate, in light of the film's constructions of its sexual power games, that the Virile Black Man gets the film's only popshot.)

Part of me wonders if this was always intended as a comedy or if circumstances of production steered it in that direction - the industry was grinding them out like sausages at this point, and there's a certain exhaustion visible in all the semis and softies on display during the fuck scenes. The other part of me is like, who cares, I laughed. The actors playing Fred and Will have a solid dumb-schmuck chemistry, Darby Lloyd Raines is gorgeous and convincingly energetic and I can't help but respect a film that, intentionally or not, turns its male actors' inability to keep it up into genuine text.

32: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog)

Owned version: The DVD released by Anchor Bay in 2002, as part of the Herzog/Kinski box set.

Acquired: 2005 presumably, from my then-local Borders.

Seen before?: Twice - once in 1996 (or thereabouts) from a VHS I'd bought used from a Blockbuster, and once from this DVD on March 7th, 2010. (The latter viewing resulted in this review, and man did I write some dopey garbage back then. I was almost 30 already, you think I'd have learned some shit.)

The camera drifts from on high, through the clouds, until settling within view of a jungle mountain. On the mountain is a long line of tiny people, burdened and trudging like marching ants, fording their way over a thin road of mud and rock. Some are natives, kept in chains and made to bear the various possessions of the others, the conquerors who have enslaved them. Around this procession is naught but trees and mist and muck, dwarfing them and making the polished metal and fine clothing worn by the conquistadors seem foolish and incongruous. Already, it seems, Nature is doing its best to swallow these people whole.

Aguirre, one of the greatest - if not the greatest - work from one of our greatest - if not the greatest - living filmmakers, is a long and difficult journey towards an inevitable destination, as the hubris of Man finds no purchase within the implacable loamy soil of Nature. This is a theme that of course Herzog would return to again and again, but it was never so clear-eyed and pitiless and it was here. Man is represented by the Spanish conquistadors in general, with their absurd dreams of finding a legendary city of gold and complete unawareness of how to deal with the landscape, and Klaus Kinski's Aguirre in particular, a dagger-eyed ice-cold sadist straining at the power hierarchy he sees within his grasp yet never able to reconcile his own implacability with the far more implacable indifference of the country through which he storms. Noblemen become tinpot dictators, priests become inquisitors ("The Church was always on the side of the strong"), and a raft in the middle of the Amazon becomes a besieged island nation before then becoming a sinking sepulchre rapidly being reclaimed by the jungle in the form of mice, butterflies and what seems a thousand chittering monkeys. Aguirre, driven round the bed by his impossible ambition and the endless hostility of the immediate world around him, dreaming of sailing to and conquering Trinidad, stares unsteadily at a monkey he's managed to grasp before tossing it aside and croaking, "Who's with me?" Herzog then cuts to the Sun, beaming bright and dispassionate forever upon him.

So it's a tragedy, one built on vanity and imperiousness. But here's the thing: That cut is also objectively funny, a triumph of context and timing. Which leads into something I never really picked up on before, despite the general tone of most Herzog films - Aguirre is also a comedy, a bleak and mordant one that takes full advantage of the absurdity of the situation to find bitter laughs in a hopeless situation. Indeed, what jokes come are almost entirely rooted in irritation and/or exhaustion - there is, for instance, a great plant-and-payoff gag early on, for instance, involving Christian burial and ceremony that earns a shocked laugh when a frustrated Aguirre disposes of some troublesome unburied corpses by ordering a raft blown up. Later in the film, Aguirre's hand-picked Emperor gorges himself on fresh fruit as his underlings are forced to count grains of corn for sustenance, and the shot of the Emperor tearing through a mango is framed so that behind him, out of focus, we can see one man staring at him, unblinking, unmoving and scowling, as though trying to will his heart to explode right then and there, and the shot (and the actor) hold long enough that passes through ominous and earns a dark chuckle; another amusing bit sees Aguirre standing still and staring off into the distance, looking increasingly pained and annoyed as a native toots away on a pipe right near his ear. Even the famed decapitation sequence, a beautiful and grotesque burst of surrealism, is preceded by a one-liner. The distance between this and Nicolas Cage nattering on about iguanas on a coffee table is not so large after all.

Key to the peculiar effect of this film, both in its tragic and comedic dimensions, is the staggering performance from Kinski. And that was another revelation - because for years I'd remembered the mania, the frothing and crazed ranting. Except... that's not what this performance is at all. Kinski does of course have his moments of outsized lunacy (there's really no other way to deliver a line like, "The Earth I walk upon sees me and quakes!"), but it's a far chillier and more nuanced performance than I'd given it credit for all these years - there's even room for moments of tenderness in it, like the last scene with his daughter Flores, a mournful prelude to his mad soliloquy among the monkeys. Said soliloquy, crucially, is also in fact a fascinating underplay - all but the last line take place inside his head, so the hissing, spiraling insanity we hear bears little resemblance to the confused, staggering wretch on screen. This is crucial because while his madness is manifest early on, it's balanced by a control born of understanding of his place in the hierarchy, so that he comes of as ruthless and determined rather than flamboyantly mad. He stalks and smolders and swaggers, only exploding on occasions where his facade of unflappable megalomania is, by circumstances, flapped pretty fucking hard. My favorite instance of this comes after the wife of an enemy, knowing all too well Kinski's ill intentions towards her husband, exclaims at him, "God will punish you!" Kinski affects a haughty, mile-long stare and a faint grin, as if to say, "Neither you nor God can hurt me, I'm fuckin' Aguirre"... and then he turns and walks directly into a horse, leading to an eruption of arm-flailing and a peeved, "Get out of my way!" Aguirre, the man who thought himself the wrath of God, the man who dreamt of being the god-king over all the New World, is a tragic fool who can't even control a single animal.

Speaking of single animals: There's another scene with Flores, an earlier one where Aguirre finds a small sloth. This is a small and beautiful scene, with a genuinely happy Aguirre regaling his daughter about this little animal's unusual life: "He spends his whole life asleep. He's never really awake." Could that be the unspoken cosmic joke at the heart of it all? Are we all just the fevered dream an ever-slumbering rodent?

31: The Agronomist (2003, Jonathan Demme)

Owned version: The 2005 DVD released by New Line Home Entertainment.

Acquired: May 20th, 2017, from used-media store CeX. I got excited when they put one in a mall near me, and I bought a bunch of stuff. Meant to go back from time to time but never could, owing to my work schedule. Now they're out of business in America. Dammit.

Seen before?: No - I've slept on most of Demme's documentary work. Because I am a fool.

Sat on this one too long - didn't mean to take a hiatus, but that's what happened. So instead of a proper review, here's some barely-digested thoughts culled from my notes:

 - If nothing else, this is a fabulous documentary because its subject is endlessly fascinating and Jonathan Demme, ever interested in the lives and thoughts of others, keeps himself inconspicuous and allows the subject to tell his story in the manner he sees fit. Jean Dominique is a firecracker, a passionate advocate for his home country of Haiti who also happens to be a raconteur of rare quality. Because he's interesting, the film is interesting.

 - When speaking on But, I Am Beautiful, the documentary film he helped make that spurred a mini-Haitian New Wave, Dominique proclaims, "The grammar of the film is a political act." This could also be said about Demme's tacit ceding of the floor to Dominique for the duration of The Agronomist - allowing Dominique to lay out the arguments regarding Haiti's history and the political quagmire therein without authorial intrusion is a political act, implying Demme's agreement with Dominique, as well as a deferential one (why try to stake a position when this guy's got it staked pretty well?).

 - In the above light, it's kind of tempting to see this as a flipside to Swimming to Cambodia - both are eccentric and energetic performance pieces (explicitly with the Gray film, implicitly here - the interlude involving Dominique's letters to his daughter that reveal a shy, retiring side he never shows in public suggest that he is, in essence, always performing and the radio microphone/camera allow the remove he needs to enact that performance) about Western exploitation of Third World nations. Swimming is an outsider's perspective on that idea, a man from a protected class reaching certain painful epiphanies about what had to happen for him to be afforded that protection, where this is from the inside, a man from one of those nations explaining the costs incurred. Both also see Demme hanging back and letting the subjects dictate the flow, asserting directorial control sparingly for maximum impact (the spectacular God's-eye-view cut in Swimming, the climactic still shots of blue sky here).

 - The title is apropos in a certain way; while Jean Dominique rose to fame as a radio broadcaster and political activist, his college degree was in agronomy and he did indeed find work in Haiti as one for a short period of time. Identifying him as "the agronomist," after his own self-identification ("I am not a journalist... I became a journalist!"), ties him to the land he fought for in a physical way that his more-famed occupation would not, his root impulse being that to nurture and foster the growth of His Land; furthermore, when Dominique quips that, as a hired gun, he was "an agronomist without land," that brings in the important political distinction between working land and having land, of being exploited versus being the exploiter.

 - When speaking on his youth, Dominique claims his love affair with Haiti stemmed in part from sojourns with his father to "the outside country," i.e. the rural villages where the poor and working classes reside. He fosters his relationship to his home by seeing the whole of the country, setting him in stark contrast to e.g. the Duvaliers, who only see (or pay attention to) the parts/persons they deem to have value. His father developed this love of country in order to instill a sort of nationalistic impulse within his son ("You are not French, you are not British, you are not American... you are Haitian!") - begging the question of what it means to be a nationalist in a territory with a long history of being denied nationhood. Also: interesting, living in a country where nationalism and militarism are joined at the hip, to see a fostering of nationalism meant to counter any impulses towards militarism.

 - Not the film's main thrust, but the role of the US in the Haitian situation is certainly not allowed to pass without comment - the election of Reagan spurring Dominique to proclaim, "Human rights no more!" followed by the discussion of "the phone call option." The complicity there is deep and ugly, and the point gets made without it turning into hectoring.

 - "the sound that you only hear when the record is stuck": boy, that's a hell of a metaphor

30: Agony of Love (1966, William Rotsler)

Owned version: The 2004 DVD released by Something Weird as a double feature with another Rotsler feature The Girl with the Hungry Eyes.

Acquired: Probably in December of 2010 from eBay after Something Weird announced that all their Harry Novak-produced titles were going out of print.

Seen before?: Once from this disc - June 8th, 2011.

"Don't you see that the money and the way you get it is not a very satisfactory substitute for love? I think what you want, Barbara, is normal love. Isn't that everything you really need?"

So says a psychiatrist to Barbara (Pat Barrington), a lonesome and disaffected housewife ignored by her business-minded husband and thus summing up the key tension of the film for those too slow or horny to get it. As a way to deal with her spiraling feelings of emptiness, Barbara fills her ample free time by adopting the alias Brandy and doing some light prostitution. Agony of Love has a certain number of plot beats in common with an acknowledged masterpiece of world cinema and indeed often feels like the grimy off-brand version of it, to the point where an alternate title could have easily been Hell de Jour (though it preceded the Bunuel by a year). It even dips into a couple of dream sequences, though Rotsler is hardly working in the puckish, mysterious register of Bunuel - the descent into the fantastic here is as blunt as the psychiatrist's diagnosis, baroque on-the-nose nightmares of sex and money and hostility in which dollar bills are threaded together into chains and horror-movie strings shriek their panic out over the Dutch-angled visuals. (The voiceover repeating the word "Barbara" and then switching it up to "money" is a fun touch.)

This, clearly, is not a subtle film. But then, sexploitation isn't a subtle genre, especially the grimly moralistic roughie (of which this is a fairly mild iteration). Taken in relation to its brethren, Agony of Love is a pretty good time. Rotsler, making his directorial debut, keeps things moving briskly - the sex scenes come at regular intervals but don't run so long as to become tiresome - and he manages to make his ragged inexperience into an asset at certain points, like a ragged pair of zooms at the end into the faces of Barbara and her husband respectively. I also like the depiction of the husband - instead of a typical lout, nebbish or philanderer, he's portrayed as a regular (if awkward and uncomfortable) guy who really loves his wife so thinks he needs to work as hard as he can to get her everything she needs and furthermore would never dream of so much as looking at another woman. It lends an unexpected bit of genuine tragedy to the expected downbeat ending, which is tough to pull off in this oft-callous genre.

Plus, there's the scene with the man billed as "The Eater," which is one of the most delightfully wackadoo things I've seen in one of these films. And Pat Barrington? She has excellent breasts. I'm only human.

29: Age of Consent (1969, Michael Powell)

Owned version: The 2015 "45th Anniversary Series" DVD released by budget-disc kings Mill Creek Entertainment.

Acquired: June 25th, 2017 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

Or, This Deserted Island Wasn't Deserted Enough.

Age of Consent centers around James Mason as a creatively frustrated painter who moves to a tiny island off the coast of Australia in search of solitude; instead, he finds a lively and pulchritudinous teenager played by a debuting Helen Mirren, and a lengthy tete-a-tete begins to develop. As the title implies, Mirren is suggested to be underage (though she seems to have no knowledge of her age, and the one character who repeatedly insists she's too youthful has good reason to keep her believing so); her side of the narrative, then, chiefly involves her own growing sense of autonomy. Indeed, the film uses a series of visual metaphors to suggest that both characters are prisoners in their own lives, from the opening credit sequence revealed to be a fishtank in which a watch is suspended as a form of advertisement to an early shot of Mason in bed with a woman shot through the headboard so as to suggest prison bars to the first meeting between Mason and Mirren - a negotiation on the price of fresh seafood caught by Mirren - arranged so that Mirren is trapped by the front door frame of Mason's beach hovel. So I guess it's ironic that the film ultimately gets imprisoned by the necessary compromises of its screenplay.

Consent, the last theatrical release of the legendary Michael Powell, had the potential to be a rough-hewn gem if it had stuck with the Mason/Mirren dynamic, if it had been possible to pare it down to a two-hander. Mason takes his natural unctuousness and tweaks it enough so that the smarm turns into a wince, the oblivious defense of a man intensely discomfited by the presence of others - he's the kind of guy you can totally see buggering off to some isolated paradise in hopes that the cessation of noise will stoke his waning muse. Mirren, meanwhile, is coded as Nature Girl, the wild animal instinct to Mason's artistic rationality; she's introduced literally emerging from under a dock as though the sea just spat her forth, and her wide-brimmed sunhat stays on even when she dives back into the ocean to escape detection by Mason's dog. (In this light, Mirren's legs and armpits going unshaven is a perfect and necessary touch.) As such, there's a base satisfaction in seeing these two find someone who can give them what they need - Mason gets a model, someone to put a spark of life back into his art, and Mirren gets an adult who will see her and treat her (to a degree) as a fellow adult. Powell's direction is unsurprisingly gorgeous - beyond the nuanced central performances, the editing is crisp and clever (and painful when necessary, e.g. the violent cut when a nude Mirren gets hit across the back with a switch) and the colors pop even on this disc's drab garbage transfer, with sparkling oceanic blues and lush overgrown greens providing contrast to the cool relaxing blacks (for shadowy exteriors) and browns (for interiors). There's even some lovely underwater photography, a fluid accoutrement that takes full advantage of the allowed access to the Great Barrier Reef (even if Mirren's big nude underwater swim is shot, due to necessary adherence to censorial codes, exactly like a nudist-camp movie). The surf-and-sand setting, the beautiful bohemian surroundings with the preponderance of natural color, makes the occasional splash of the artificial that much more impactful; while there's nothing on the level of the berserk use of the red dress in Black Narcissus, the discovery of Mirren's secret money stash - her ticket to a life off the island and thus true freedom! - by her drunken avaricious aunt is given an extra frisson by the pointed contrast of a hot pink handbag tossed on top of moss and rock, screaming the defilement of this secret place to the woods around it.

That drunken aunt, though, is indicative of the crippling problem with Age of Consent - namely that there's other people in it. Every time Powell has to drag in another character, the film loses its bearings; it's a delicate back-and-forth into which a goddamn Carry On film keeps poking its snout. There's the aunt, an unintelligible screech machine. There's the young man who runs the ferry between the island and the mainland, a lean himbo whose big scene is one where he unsuccessfully attempts to force himself on Mirren. (This scene, truth be told, isn't a complete botch - it's mostly about the young man's awkward nervousness, which is both an interesting way to defuse any potential ugliness and an interesting way to play with a completely different vague sort of ugliness.)  There's Mason's neighbor, a female chicken farmer whose sole character trait is that she really, really badly wants some dick. And there's Mason's friend/agent, a licentious mainlander who spends the majority of his screen time talking about banging beautiful women and steals a wad of cash from Mason so that the plot will have somewhere to go in its last half-hour. The last two get dovetailed in quick plot thread about the two of them meeting for dinner, culminating in a baffling and tasteless joke where the agent declares he's been raped. If it happens to Mirren, it's uncool, but when it happens to this jerkwad it's a larf. Yeah, sure, whatever.

If the script dumbs itself down to allow for these broad Komedy interludes, resulting in corny groaners like the agent seeing Mirren and declaring, "I've got a bird of me own," immediately leading to a cut where the chicken-farming neighbor is carving up a roasted bird, it ultimately self-destructs by trying to reconcile the incompatible relationship between the two. Here, then, is where its capitulation to a certain form of crowd-pleasing formula goes past tiresome into fatal - the more I think about the end, the more sour it seems. As Consent digs into the relationship between Mirren and Mason, it comes to an impasse - Mirren clearly has feelings for Mason, feelings which are not being reciprocated. He sees her as an adult, which is gratifying and fulfilling for her, but she comes to realize he only sees her this way because he sees her as a subject - just because he recognizes her womanhood doesn't mean he recognizes her autonomy, and in a scene like the one where Mason is struggling to paint a posing Mirren only to shake his head and mutter, "It's the dress. Take it off." without so much as looking at her... well, that evocative downcast glance by the newly-nude Mirren speaks volumes. She's merely traded one jailer for another and she knows it. So why then, given that this is about her struggle towards autonomy, does it end the way it does? I have to assume this is a function of needing to adhere to the source material - a novel by an artist renowned for his work with the nude female form - but there's still something desperate in the way it manufactures a facsimile of a happy ending, with Mason at the last minute understanding the emotional attachment Mirren has developed for him and deciding - whether out of emotional epiphany or panic at losing his muse, the film isn't clear - sure, fuck it, I do love you too. I try not to be the kind of person who reviews the film they wish they'd seen rather than the one they did, but picking at a perceived flaw necessarily assumes there's a version of this material that would have pleased me; therefore, I submit a stronger film would have Mason left abashed and alone as a chuffed Mirren swims back into the sea that birthed her. But Powell ain't Rohmer, and this ain't La Collectionneuse. So her nascent autonomy gets betrayed in favor of her being revealed as an eleventh-hour Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She was right when she tearfully said, "You only want me for the pictures," and it's to the film's ultimate detriment that it realizes this and frantically tries to wave it away anyway. A pantheon director deserves to go out on better than such a flat note.