Letterboxd — Your life in film

The Adventures of Lancaster!
Acrobat of daring feats!
Carnivalesque as combat
Rabelaisian Revolution!

I’m not particularly familiar with the genre of medieval adventure films outside of the canonical The Adventures of Robin Hood, but this made me curious to explore more. A little tedious for the first hour, though never without wit or amusement. But truly takes up a whole different meaning by the finale, as Tourneur literalizes the Rabelaisian carnivalesque to raise the revolution against the oppressive king. Lancaster…

Gun crazy men
And gold crazy women.
Double crossings
Fit for a revolution.
Embrace the smile, Burt.

Was worried at first that Lancaster was going to out act Gary Cooper, whose working in High Noon territory despite the film being quite the opposite, but soon levels into a fascinating duo. Could make a great double feature with Duck, You Sucker!, as both are films about people exploiting the Mexican revolution for their own gain. Film is filled with utter delights,…

The last warrior
On a path of violence.
The cries of a child
The seeds of a new peace.

For a director who rarely gets talked as one of "the greats," shocking to see how pronounced Aldrich's style already is in his second feature: thrilling long takes, jarring editing, and always more violence (even the playful love sequence between Lancaster and Peters includes her smacking him with a stick). Disappoints after watching Daves's take on similar territory, but Aldrich seems…

Bodies and machines
Sensual and orgasmic.
Searching for meaning
Amongst their scars.
Long live the metallic flesh.

A pitch perfect opening shot: a nipple rubbing against a metallic surface with all the pleasures that could possibly entertain. Crash is so distinctly Cronenbergian and ambitious in its thematic material it's hard to not enjoy the film: obsessions with the relationship between man and machine, how psychological developments manifest themselves into physical scars, and an addiction to the sexual perversity as a…

The malleable borders
Between cities and farms
Fathers and sons
Man and animal.
The sheep perseveres.

I can sort of see why Dan Sallitt called this the first major work of 2013, but I wasn't particularly feeling it. Obviously the narrative structure, sound design, and use of space are all quite striking, but consider me somewhat disinterested in the actual particulars of the drama, which I found often banal or unclear, and the reliance on some of the long takes…

Assholes of America
And their petty dreams.
Self-conscious mocking
For old school moralism.
"Fucks" don't deserve it.

Michael Bay should never moralize—it's that simple. For about 20 minutes, Bay had me hooked into his over-emephaiszed, over-accented, over-everything State of the Union address, in which everyone buys into the same bullshit of some false notion of the American dream. More than that, his camera seemed relatively restrained while still finding subtle jokes and interesting frames to work through his characters' anxieties.…