This is as close to a musical day as we can get on this list.

81. Nana (Valérie Massadian, 2011, France)

This is one of the hardest movies on this list to find on IMDb (probably after W). There’s so many movies with the same name and this is a pretty obscure one, so just in case, here it is.

Nana is a four-year-old girl, who lives with her mother in a secluded cabin. Then, one day Nana comes back from school and her mother is nowhere to be found. What does she do? Well, she just continues with whatever she is doing. Managing quite well, actually.

This is just a movie that has stayed with me. Its a short, simple movie. No embellishment, no stylistic additions, no camera tricks. Its just us, watching Nana continue her life. And in this, its kind of ingenious. I’m not a parent, but just watching Nana alone is gut-wrenching. At the same time, Nana is fine. She figures out what to eat. Her choices might not be the best, but she’s not starving. She even goes to school and finally, when she finds her mother’s body in the woods, she figures out what to do even at that point even if she doesn’t seem to really understand death. The way this movie plays with my sympathy is just great. I don’t feel manipulated, but rationally I do understand what it is trying to do.

Its not exactly subtle. The movie opens with a scene, where Nana’s grandfather kills a pig, let’s out the blood and burns the fur off of it. This is done right in front of his grandchildren, who follow the whole process with interest. Life in countryside can be harsh. Is this the reason for Nana’s ability to cope so easily with the new situation? Or are all children that way, but we just can’t see that because we cuddle them too much?

The way I found this movie was through a documentary series, or actually more like an educational series, called Women Make Film, which goes through various moviemaking related topics by using exclusively examples from movies made by women. Nana was one of those movies. The scene I remember being used was Nana just being a kid. There was a static camera capturing Nana walking to school alone on the side of the road and at times just playing around.

Scenes like these are an excellent example of less being more. It is only a small thing, but tells you a lot about Nana just being a kid, even if she clearly is smart for her age and very independent. It is a great character moment. I wish more moviemakers would have this kind of restrain to just trust their actors, even if in this particular case the actor probably has a very limited understanding of what is going on. Or maybe in this particular case, where your ability to direct the actor is kind of limited, you need to trust interesting things to happen, a bit like documentary filmmaking.

Finally, why does the mother die? I’m not talking about the actual cause, but how does the world around her just let her die? There is clearly something wrong with her, but she hasn’t received help. Is this just her stubborness or is there something else at play here? Her relationship to her father seems to be pretty bad, as at no point does she talk to him, she just leaves him a note on his car written with crayons demanding him to finish fixing a fence, which she apparently feels entitled to. As far as I remember, this is the only scene in the movie not told from Nana’s point of view. (Actually, I’m sure there are others, but the other must have been less important.)

Since the movie keeps mostly to Nana’s point of view, it is really hard to say. The kid doesn’t know the world enough to see that there is indeed something wrong here. Why doesn’t anyone else notice? She must interact with the outside world in some way to get the things she needs, so why is no-one noticing? In the end, we just don’t know.

The relationship between the mother and the daughter does seem to be very good. They do have fun together at least in one scene, but it feels like the cinematic language is trying to tell us that the mother does love her daughter. However, there is also a feeling that she might not have actually planned to have a life like this. Also, there is one scene, where Nana is sitting alone with a jigsaw puzzle and muttering lines like “what a fucking mess” and “I’m sick of your bullshit”. She must have learned that from somewhere, so perhaps their life isn’t as idyllic as it might seem.

80. Gosford Park (Robert Altman, 2001, United Kingdom)

A group of rich people, many of whom are of the nobility, get together to hunt, or more like “hunt” as it’s all about shooting birds released just for this purpose. Not all of them are even interested in that. They are there to be seen or to gain something. However, the host, William McCordle, is murdered, which leads to an investigation, where the incompetent inspector gets nowhere, but a lot of dirt is uncovered by one of the servants.

Class is strong here. The inspector dismisses many notions simply based on his assumptions on how people of different classes act. The bumbling inspector and his more competent constable are a weird comedic sideplot to the otherwise dramatic story, though. They seem to be there to hammer home the overall themes.

Men and women are highly segregated. Servants of different genders have their own halls, so that there isn’t fraternizing among them, which actually seems to leave the women vulnerable to the upper class men, who flout the restrictions.

The upper class women are not segregated quite this way, but at the same time the whole event is for the men. Sure, the women can shoot, if they want to, but they aren’t as interested in it or they just don’t do it, because it would not be seen as a feminine thing to do. Still, they have to be there, even if the entertainment is not to their liking. And their class is destroying their ability to enjoy life. There are a few people involved in making movies in the US in attendance and they are scoffed at by some of the older nobility. How much better is life, when you can actually enjoy things and don’t have to see such advances in technology and art as meaningless fads just because they go against your understanding of tradition? I mean, in the big picture it wasn’t that long ago when Shakespeare was seen as garbage for the masses.

The nobility are completely incapable of seeing the struggles of the lower class, because this is the natural way of things for them. One of them even jokes about how she should be billing her assistant (or whatever her title was) for teaching her the job, even though obviously that assistant couldn’t under any circumstances afford that (and she is still working). We also get to see that this particular servant is actually the one who is smart enough to figure everything out, because she actually understands the interactions between the different people in the whole picture.

This also betrays the different statuses between the people in the lower classes as well. She is able to do this, because she only has one person to take care of instead of having duties from early on in the morning until late in the evening. The service staff doesn’t really have free moment. When they do, they need to be ready to be back on the job at any moment. Remember that story about King Charles III calling for a servant, because he had dropped a pen and couldn’t be bothered to pick it up? This is the life of these people. And it pays like shit as well.

In the end, the murder is the result of McCordle not giving a shit about the people working for him. He impregnate his female workers during the Great War and promise their children good homes, but just dumping them into a orphanage instead. So, one of them finds out and decides to avenge his mother, but the mother isn’t really dead, but has been a servant to McCordle all these years, so realizing her son is going to do something, she decides to do it first instead.

That’s a pretty out there ending for a story that is otherwise quite grounded, but you don’t really mind, because despite the convoluted finale, it does tie things nicely together. There have been many hints to this throughout the movie. There is also some amount of Christie influence here throughout, so it doesn’t come exactly from nowhere.

79. Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992, USA)

Penguin is causing havoc in the city, but Max Shreck decides to clean up his image to make him the next mayor. Shreck has more problems than that, as Catwoman, his former employee thought to be dead, comes back to haunt him. Meanwhile, Batman tries to reign them all in.

Tim Burton’s sequel to the hugely successful Batman, which ignited the interest in superhero properties back in the late 80s. They gave him pretty free reign over this movie and he used that to make something… different.

It’s a messed up movie. As it always seemed in this quadrology of Batman movies, Batman always seems to be somewhat peripheral to the story. Mostly we follow Penguin, who is trying to enact his revenge on the upper echelon of the city after being discarded as a child due to his unusual appearance, and Catwoman, who has her own plans of revenge against Max Shreck, who killed her for being too knowledgeable of the scams Shreck’s company was up to.

The world is peak-Burton. Dark and gloomy, but at the same time it has flair. Penguin’s gang is a bunch of circus performers and Catwoman’s outfit looks like a bunch of pieces of leather sown together with little planning (obviously, it was meticulously planned as it is very form-fitting).

The movie has an important plot element about the importance of saving face, and finally the futility of trying to fight against it. Penguin lives in the sewers, because that was where he ended up after his parents decided to get rid of him, because he looked different. They actually tried to murder their child, because keeping up appearance of sophistication is more important to them than actually acting like human beings.

Then we have Selina Kyle. She starts as an assistant to Shreck, but she is clearly overqualified for the job. She just happens to be a woman, which – in this world – makes her both inadequate to have any say, and eventually, disposable. However, her character is also made fun of because she is feminine. And this is not only within the movie, but when she dies and returns as a more confident version of herself, the first thing she does is tear up all the “girly” things in her apartment, because the world sees being girly basically synonymous to being weak.

Other things we learn, which are there for humor, but at the same time do play on stereotypes in a negative way, is she has a nagging mother, a man who is portrayed as weak in her life (we only hear his voice on the answering machine, as he ditches her from a planned trip) and Shreck’s department store has identified her as a potential customer for a perfume, which it promises will get the attention of her boss (obviously, the automated advert doesn’t know who her boss is, but it is a nice touch from the moviemakers). Her gender is played off as a joke.

After her transformation, the sexism from people within the movie continues. She is underestimated because of her gender and she even uses that to her advantage against Batman. He can’t even admit that his encounter with her was painful.

It’s weird that the sexism is at the same time a part of the movie and something the moviemakers did, because they didn’t quite get it. Of course, 1992 was a whole world away and things have changed since then, but that shouldn’t be used as an excuse.

Catwoman isn’t the only problematic character here either. There aren’t many female characters, but even the few they do have are often portrayed as bimbos, like you can’t be beautiful and smart at the same time (except for Catwoman). There is no man in the movie depicted similarly.

… and yes, I know it’s weird that my favorite superhero movie is from way before superhero movies became big, way before Dark Knight or Logan or the whole Marvel Universe. You know, from a simpler time, where the main villain of the movie could still drive around in a rubber duck and emperor penguins could still lay their dead friend to rest.

Sidenote: As I’m writing this, Paul Reubens just died. He had a small role here as the father of Penguin. This was pretty much right after the manufactured scandal he was going through, which for a while destroyed his career. But at least we’ll always have Pee-Wee.

78. La voie lactée (The Milky Way) (Luis Buñuel, 1969, France)

Two vagabonds, Dupont and Duval according to their identity papers, are following an ancient pilgrimage route from France to Santiago in Spain. On the way, they witness various historical Catholic heresies, but are generally (understandably) more interested in their own problems then the weirdos around them, who are a welcome distraction at best. Often the pair don’t even witness what’s going on. The action moves away from them and for a while we just follow some other events.

The two men have a significant age disparity and they don’t even seem to know each other that well. They just feel solidarity for someone in the same situation as they are themselves in and find the companionship nice. Or that’s how I read it. They don’t talk that much about anything, which might be a sign of just being comfortable enough with each other not to talk too much. Small talk is just a way to get to know people, after all, and the more homogenic societies do it less.

There is no real story here. The duo is there as an excuse to explain these heresies, which, according to Buñuel were thoroughly researched based on various documentation available. Others seem to agree with this, but at the same time I am somewhat skeptical, as historically heretics have been somewhat hesitent to leave behind evidence of their thoughts. Buñuel has also been known to lie (see his proto-mockumentary Land Without Bread). It is of course possible that the documentation was by Catholics themselves, who documented various confessions and made their own interpretation of them.

Interspersed with these are modern (at the time) discussions of religion, which always seem to be about shutting down any sort of independent thought on subject with the kind of rhetoric you still hear (for example, absurdly out of context lines from Bible used to prove the existence of God). Buñuel himself was a lifelong atheist (and actually thanked God for it), but as so many other atheistic filmmakers like him, religion was a fascinating mystery he knew could never be fully unravelled. This was not his only movie about it.

As usual in Christianity, women are in subservient positions like nuns or, in one case, children regurgitating rules of conduct. The Bible has a lot of material specifically about keeping women down, so this is not a surprise, of course, and I don’t see any of the heresies rising up against this unjust approach either. At best, they wish to change the rules to be allowed to take advantage of women in new ways.

Virgin Mary does make an appearance here and there, and she is of course revered, although, somewhat slyly, Buñuel also makes it clear that she is not a virgin anymore (as Jesus, according to various sources, had at least one sibling, possibly more). She is just this innocent woman, who seems very friendly. In one case he tells Jesus not to shave his beard and in another case she appears to return a rosary to a man who had just shot it in an act of rebellion against the church.

77. Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011, United Kingdom)

Jay and Gal have been out of the hired killers game for a while now after a job went haywire. When a new opportunity arises, they are hesitant at first, but due to economic realities, which has been tearing Jay’s family apart, they go for it. However, the job turns out to be much more than what they bargained for, but this just spurs the initially reluctant Jay into something that begins to eat at him spiritually, but that may just be the point.

This movie doesn’t give you much in the way of breathing room. The few moments of levity are brief and even in those moments there always seems to be a shadow of something hanging in the background. And when it goes dark, it goes really, really dark. There could be a lot of content warnings here, even though some of these are just off-screen rather than shown, but still, that may be too much for some people.

Gal seems to be a womanizer (although I don’t want to read too much into active dating, but often in movies this is how womanizing manifests itself, even though Gal seems to be a decent boyfriend), but Jay has been happily married with a child for a while. Well, happily might be a little too much. Shel, his wife, is apparently herself a capable person, but has become a stay-at-home mom. No problem with this, if it was her choice, but if she was put into this role only based on traditional gender roles, it is not good.

Their marriage is very strained. There clearly is love between them, but at the same time Jay’s inability to provide for the family is driving a wedge between them. So, why not just let her work, while he is home until he is able to work again? Of course, this is just me making assumptions based on how classic sexism works.

However, ultimately, at the very end of the movie, Jay kills Shel. He doesn’t know it before it has happened, though. There is a ritual of sorts, where a bunch of cultists force Jay to fight for his life against a masked hunchback, who turns out to be Shel with Sam, their son, strapped on to his back. So, Shel becomes a sacrifice. She is something Jay needs to get rid of in order to achieve… something. We don’t really know what is going on here, but clearly the cult has a special interest in Jay. What’s weird is that when Shel’s face is revealed, she seems happy to have died in this way.

There is a constant undercurrent of gender roles coming into play. For example, there’s Fiona, Gal’s date to a dinner party, who works in human resources. Gal calls her a “hatchet man”, but then quickly corrects himself winkingly and calls her a “hatcher person” instead. However, she uses the word “manpower” immediately after.

The real joke here is that Fiona is a member of the cult, who is in the process of recruiting Jay. So, human resources. A lot of members of the cult die in order to get Jay in, so it’s hinted that she is acting as the hatchet person as someone had to choose who dies in this effort. She just feels the same need to keep her real job secret, so she speaks of it in the dullest terms possible.

This is the weirdest fucking Hero’s Journey, if you want to analyze it as such (sorry, I’ve been thinking a lot about Hero’s Journey as of late). You can do it quite easily as well. There is a Departure (going back to work), the Initiation (where Jay and initially Gal murder a bunch of people) and finally the Return, in which there is no real return, but isolation instead (by losing his family and the rest of his support network).

I really don’t think that’s the point, but I do find it funny how easily we can fit anything to that mold (even though we shouldn’t).

76. The Last of Sheila (Herbert Ross, 1973, USA)

A year after Sheila died in a hit-and-run, her widow, Clinton, invites his friends on a cruise full of games. Well, more like a single weirdly sadistic extended game, where Clinton torments his guests about their personal secrets. However, it turns out he hit on something he wasn’t supposed to and is murdered, leaving the guests to figure out who did it, making the game much more real.

“Friend” here is quite ambiguous, because all of the six guests are in some way relient on being in Clinton’s good graces, as he is a movie producer and the guests work in the field in some form or another. While their enthusiasm about joining the cruise varies, they are clearly more or less obligated to be there. These are not equal relationships, even though the guests do at times try to push back on Clinton’s cruel jokes. There isn’t much consent involved (which in itself makes the situation not a real game by many definitions, which require voluntary participation).

We can also see how social norms have apparently changed over the last fifty-plus years. One of the secrets is “little child molester” and the movie doesn’t seem to see that as any worse than shoplifting. On the other hand, I’m not sure if this movie is representative. Homosexuality is also seen as not a big deal, but it was still illegal in large parts of the world or had only recently being legalized.

The cast is great. Weirdly, the first credited Richard Benjamin is probably quite easily the least known of the seven main characters. Besides him, we have Joan Hackett, who is probably somewhat forgotten as her career was cut short by early death in early 80s, as well as James Coburn, James Mason, Raquel Welch, Ian McShane and Dyan Cannon. Its also the only movie writing credit for Anthony Perkins and Steven Sondheim, a kind of weird pairing, but this is actually because the two used to host murder mystery parties, in which the director, Herbert Ross, used to participate.

From a feminist point of view, the women are varied and they are not there purely as tokens. For example, Christine is a successful talent agent, risen to that position from being a secretary. She is also promiscuous and is in now way judged for that by the movie.

The other two women, Alice and Lee, are not as free. Lee seems to be gaslighted by her husband, while Alice’s husband seems a bit too controlling in other ways. The latter relationship is kind of problematic. Alice is a successful actor, but her husband is in control of her career as her agent. Alice is havinge an affair, though, but does that mean that she has more control over her situation or that she wants out of her marriage, but doesn’t really know how.

One of the themes of the movie is that everyone has their own skeletons in their closets, but there seems to be a different approach to how those skeletons got there for the women than the men.

From a movie business point of view, the ending is the important part. Before that, their business relationships have mostly just been a reason for all of them to come together, but at that point things change. One of them figures out the killer, but instead of telling anyone else, this information becomes blackmail fodder. The blackmailer wants the killer to finance his next project. That’s it. There is no attempt to find justice. It’s just one more way to conduct the very cutthroat business.

75. De uskyldige (The Innocents) (Eskil Vogt, 2021, Norway)

Ida is a kid, who is not looking forward to a life in a new town as one of her age would. First Ida has trouble meeting other kids in their new neighborhood, but she does meet Ben, another lonely kid, who happens to have weird powers, as well as Aisha, who is discovering her own powers. At first, they are simply having fun, but things get out of hand.

Ida acts disturbingly sadistically towards her older sister, Anna, who is on the spectrum. Kids can be extremely cruel. There’s so many trigger warnings here. I mean, if you are an animal lover, you might want to stay away from this. If you want to believe in the inner goodness of children, don’t even think about watching this. But there is truth here. Children haven’t necessarily evolved a moral or ethical code yet. It takes time.

The kids aren’t in an easy situation either. Ida feels she is not getting the attention she deserves because of Anna and has to often take a second seat. To us adults this would seem obvious, but Ida is, again, just a kid. She feels Anna is a burden to her in other ways as well. Other kids give them looks, when they are outside together, which Anna experiences as isolating.

Ida is not the only one in a difficult situation. Aisha’s mother is going through something very difficult, which definitely affects Aisha as well. Ben’s homelife, on the other hand, seems to be pretty horrific.

It’s actually Ben, who becomes the villain, while Anna becomes the hero. The climax of the movie is a battle between the two, but its done incredibly tastefully and subtly. They are surrounded by people, but no one even notices.

Its hard to say how Anna feels about all of this. She emerges from her own world only when needed and immediately retreats back, when the danger is over. Does she feel bad about all of this? Who knows.

Ida, on the other hand, does sort find a conscience. She on the way to becoming a true psychopath, even going as far as trying to kill Ben on her own, but in that case she’s trying to protect others. Still, she was willing to do it. She was just interrupted by someone. That does become a learning experience, as she realizes the situation she has put her family in and feels responsible.

Ben and Aisha both have single mothers. They are also both of immigrant backgrounds. I don’t really know, but I would assume they are both of African descent. (Aisha has a skin disease which makes it hard to say, but her mother is very black, so I would assume sub-Saharan Africa, but this is just a guess.) It’s hard for me to say why this decision was made. They stand out as the only people of color in a town full of white people (there aren’t that many black people in Norway, especially outside of the larger urban areas). In that regard, I kind of dislike the decision to show off these two families as dysfunctional. On the other hand, opportunities for minority actors aren’t necessarily very common, so why not give them a chance?

Or maybe I’m just reading this wrong. Maybe the point is that only those isolated from the peers can have these powers. I just don’t see much of an indication of this in the movie, as the movie never (rightly) explains the origins of these abilities.

74. Seppuku (Harakiri) (Masaki Kobayashi, 1962, Japan)

A ronin (a masterless samurai) arrives at a palace. He is planning on killing himself and wishes perform his seppuku there. However, there’s a reason he wants to do it specifically at this place, which is something the household does not like.

The household is already apprehensive about letting any ronin into the house, because there have been situations in the past, where ronin have arrived at the house with similar intent, but were actually just looking for handouts. The representative of the household recounts a story of this from the past, where they made sure one of these ronin went through with the ritual as a warning to others.

The movie is named Harakiri in the west, but there is a difference. Harakiri is part of seppuku. Harakiri is the ritual disembowelment of one’s self, but seppuku also includes the decapitation by whoever is overseeing the ritual. Neither were generally performed for honor until the 20th century. Seppuku was sometimes performed to avoid potential torture by the enemy. In a way Bushido has a similar history to chivalry. Neither really existed. They were inventions of people wishing to build a history that would fit their political purposes.

This movie is an attempt to deconstruct this. There is no honor here. Only an attempt to appear honorable. The household hides certain defeated samurai in order to not seem weak. All the formalities and pageantry of court life is there just to maintain a facade of honorablity.

The newly arrived ronin is actually the father-in-law of the previously murdered ronin (yes, it is murder, even if they sort of were able to excuse it for themselves). The whole thing has been meticulously planned to humiliate the household. The ronin made sure the people he asked to perform the decapitation report themselves to be ill, but in actuality the ronin has defeated each of them in combat and cut off their hair, so that he can demonstrate how weak the clan actually is.

… and sure, it would have been humiliating, but it just doesn’t work, because the household simply sweeps everything under the rug.

Now, I don’t know of this specific time in Japan’s history (1630), but earlier in Japan’s history the daughters of nobility were seen as more valuable then the sons. This was because the emperor would often retire early, leaving the empire to be run by a teenage son (sometimes even younger than that). That son would then be wed to woman, who was older than the son and would thus act as both a sort of surrogate mother and the wife. This would give the father of the empress influence.

This incentivized the fathers to maintain good relationships to their daughters. It was often even beneficial to just keep the daughters around instead of finding a husband early, because you needed an older daughter to gain that access to the emperor. Of course, this didn’t work out most of the time, but was still seen a worth the risk.

Here, our ronin actually refuses to marry his daughter off into a financially beneficial situation, because he wants his daughter to be happy with the man she has loved since childhood. This just doesn’t work out, because of the fall of the house both of the men served.

Despite taking the views of his daughter into account, the ronin is still making decisions for her. There is no discussion on this. Actually, he goes behind her back to suggest this arrangement to his future son-in-law. And sure, that is the stance between these two options one would hope he would take, but he is still limiting himself to them, when in reality he doesn’t have to. He is still taking ownership of his daughter’s life.

His decision does eventually lead to the death of both his daughter and son-in-law indirectly, as the daughter also kills herself after learning about the fate of her husband. While I wouldn’t really advocate the daughter’s marriage to a richer man either, this does raise the question of the repercussions of the lack of agency on the daughter’s part.

73. Teorema (Theorem) (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968, Italy)

No-one questions it when a man announces his arrival to a rich family through a letter. Once he does arrive, he seduces or let’s himself be seduced by, one by one, all the members of the household, including the maid and the maybe the dog (but this is left to your imagination). Each seduction has monumental repercussions to the family member involved.

The maid is the first. She becomes enlightened, returns to her village as a saint and performs miracles until she has herself buried alive. Her life was very different from the family itself. She’s meek and selfless in her work, so when she becomes freed from her paradigm, she is able to help others without framework of domestic servitude.

The family has a variety of outcomes. The daughter becomes catatonic, the son leaves the family to join a community of artists, the mother starts to have affairs with younger men and the father sheds all insignia of modern life, returning to nature naked having given away his factory to the workers. There seems to be no change in the life of the dog. I guess each of the humans evolved (or devolved, I guess, based on your point of view) into something more natural, in which case the dog wouldn’t really have a need to evolve in the same way.

We don’t really know who the man was. Pasolini said he didn’t really know either, but he also said that we are free to read him as an avatar of either side of the Christian godhood coin (so, either Jahve or Lucifer, but he also made it clear that it isn’t Jesus).

But if the name of the movie is Theorem, what does this all mean? You could read it as giving a hypothesis (the movie begins with a flash forward of the confusion caused by the father’s decision to give away the factory), then going through the steps of giving proof (the seductions and their outcomes) and then finally coming to a conclusion.

Is this reading even required? Not really, but it can provide additional depth to the movie. Not that the theorem is straightforward or really a theorem at all, as they are supposed to be simple and easy to follow, and devoid of room for interpretation.

On the other hand, Pasolini was openly a communist (although, he was open about his disagreements with the communist party of Italy at the time), so maybe the easy to follow reading of all this would be that if the world was a little more enlightened, the workers would control the means of production, but that just seems to take away the opportunity to interpret the art.

Of course, all characters in the movie have very different reactions to the situation, but from the point of view of our themes, is there a gender-based reason on why Pasolini chose to give each person the outcome they received? Did the mother become promiscuous specifically, because that was the most transgressive option? Did the daughter become catatonic, because Pasolini felt she would be the least equipped to handle her new paradigm? Did the maid become a holy person, because women are seen as more eager to sacrifice themselves for those around them?

I do feel that the outcomes did come from some prejudice, but was it Pasolini’s prejudices or his exploration of prejudices in larger cultural contexts?

72. The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940, USA)

Tom Joad returns from prison only to find out that the family farm has been lost to the bank, as have most of the farms around them. The word is that there is work out west, so most of the families are moving there, but as everyone has heard the same news, things don’t go well as the Joad family try to find a little bit of comfort in a world where everything and everyone seems to be against them and other people like them.

Early on in the movie we get a dose of the absurdity of the situation. A neighboring family has lost their farm, because the bank decided so. The patriarch of the family wants to settle the situation, but the man informing him of it just points out that there’s no reason to attack the man who runs the company owning the land, because the bank made him do what he did, while the bank manager is just doing what the calculations says is correct, so there’s no-one at fault, as everyone can fall back on the system with no consideration on who built the system or who it’s working for. Conscience has been forced out of people by distancing them from the repercussions of what they are doing.

And how did the whole thing, the Dust Bowl, come about? Because the people on the land were forced to overwork it because of competition, which was part of the reason why the grass that was holding the soil in place was removed. So, the system was the reason why all those farms were lost, but the system was also the beneficiary.

The people on the land had to leave en masse, which allowed others to exploit them. At that point they have already lost all their material possessions, but the family is also breaking apart, which takes it’s toll mentally, as well as limiting their earning potential. Finding prosperity devolves into simply surviving. And the film is much more optimistic than the novel.

As so often happens in these stories, the men have a little bit of agency, while the women are more or less stuck in this situation. The movie focuses quite a bit on Tom, which is a departure from the book, which gave many of the family members at least some spotlight. Here Ma Joad gets to share here views here and there, but mostly she doesn’t have much of a choice regarding anything, as the society around her (including the writers) just expect her to just be the strong one, who is always at the core, but never really in control.

Rosasharn (or Rose-of-Sharon) on the other hand has to learn to be an adult quickly. She is pregnant (but doesn’t lose the child as she does in the book), but her husband runs off after realizing that there isn’t much of a future with his extended family of Joads. Once again, she doesn’t have much control over the situation, but has to bear the brunt of it.

My favorite character in the movie is Casy. He is a former preacher, who has lost his faith and is now looking for something else. He becomes an agitator of sorts for the labor stirring labor movement among the displaced people, which puts him into a lot of risk, but also reinvigorates him, giving him a reason to continue his existence. After all, while capitalism has tried to remove this from our thinking, we are still, deep down, wired to find helping other enjoyable. That’s how societies are actually built and we should lean on it more.

71. Sita Sings the Blues (Nina Paley, 2008, USA)

Nina, a version of the director-writer-producer-animator-editor of the film, Nina Paley, to whom I will refer to as Paley later on to make a distinction between the character and the creator, is left by her partner, who has moved to India. Nina processes this situation through the Indian myth about Sita.

The first acting credit is for Annette Hanshaw, a musical star from the early days of recorded music, who had been dead for decades when this movie was released. She is the singing voice of Sita, but she is also the reason this movie’s release has remained quite limited, as her music wasn’t cleared. It does also add to the weirdness of the movie. These stories that take place in India and Sri Lanka thousands of years ago are soundtracked by early 20th century Jazz.

That is not the only weirdness. The animation style changes often. The musical numbers have their own quite Western looking style, while the rest of Sita’s story, the shadow puppet narrators and, one other short section, feel more Indian. The framing story is much simpler and cruder than the Sita parts. The aforementioned narrators are fun. They don’t always agree. There is three of them and they correct each other, sometimes they argue over details, and sometimes they just outright admit that they don’t know.

In some ways Hanshaw’s music is not a good choice. Sure, she is fine enough, but she is often also considered a safe version for the white listeners of the black jazz singers of her time. I assume Paley just happened across her at an unfortunate moment and couldn’t get over the idea of using her voice in the film. I also assume Sita’s story had a similar, but more fortunate, reasoning behind it.

Sita is actually kind of a weird choice here. She is a damsel in distress, but getting her back doesn’t even save her, because that just leaves her unprotected, as her husband doesn’t want her back anymore, as she is now considered unclean, even though her kidnapper seemed to have some funny ideas regarding consent (kidnapping her was fine, but he promised not to rape her immediately).

She isn’t even really a character, because she doesn’t have much agency. She does resist her kidnapper by not having sex with him and he decides to stay outside of her husbands castle after having been kicked out, but that is the extend of it. Even when she has an opportunity to do something, she is very passive.

Which is how many women were portrayed in mythology, but I do find it interesting that Paley would latch herself so strongly to this specific story. After all, there are a lot of myths where women do have agency.

There is a question of cultural appropriation. Is this an example of that? I don’t think so. While I can’t obviously speak for Indians, the movie doesn’t do anything I would find disrespectful, on purpose or otherwise. Nor does it feel exploitative or use stereotypes. While, again, I can’t really make this decision, I feel this is kind of educational. It understands the complicated and possibly political nature of myths while giving us a glimpse of how this works in this specific society.

Note: I recently stumbled upon a Nina Paley post where she tells us that she has been cancelled since 2017, so I had to look into that. Apparently, she has been cohosting a gender-critical podcast. I thought about removing this movie from the list, but at the same time I want this moment documented for myself.

70. Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952, USA)

Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont are a couple on-screen and off-screen (well, the latter is just PR, but Lina seems a bit too eager to keep up the facade). They work in Hollywood in the ear of silent movies. However, despite initially resisting them as only a fad, the new technology of the talkies threatens their careers, especially as they believe Lina’s (quite exaggerated) speaking style is not suitable for the new age. Also, Don has fallen for a chorus girl, who would fit the big screen much better than Lina, but Lina is the star, so her word is law in these quarters.

A 40-year-old star falling for a 20-year-old chorus girl smells a bit like #metoo. He even pushes her career, so that he can maintain a relationship with her. In a true romantic comedy trope, women keep throwing themselves at him, but he is only interested in the one that is not interested in him and makes it known in no uncertain terms. We are only now getting to a place where the female love interests can be age appropriate, so we can’t really blame this movie for this.

Fun fact: Jean Hagen, who plays Lina Lemont, actually had a voice nice enough to sing in several movies. In fact, she dubs Debbie Reynolds in this movie, when Reynolds is supposed to be dubbing Hagen. Reynolds’ singing was actually dubbed throughout the movie. So they were quite ironically doing the very thing they are making fun off.

Lamont’s career ending due to talkies actually something that happened to several big stars. And while I don’t have any statistics on this, it would seem to me that most of them were women. Although I guess some male comedy stars lost their shine as stars as well (Chaplin took his time before moving into talkies, but did relatively well, although his output would slow down significantly).

It wasn’t only a problem with voice or speech. Style of acting changed as well. With speech, the message was delivered without exaggerated movements and facial expressions, which was how it was done in silent movies. There was also the problem of early microphones, which were big and complicated enough to restrict movement. In some cases, as depicted in this movie, opportunities just dried up, when musicals suddenly became big. Not everyone can sing and/or dance. Even in these situations the women were often in the worse positions. You may know the old joke about Ginger Rogers having to do everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels.

But anyhow, this movie is just fun. The namesake song had actually been around for a couple of decades at that point, but the scene has become so iconic that this isn’t widely known. Of course, much of the humor doesn’t really hold up after 73 years, but that doesn’t really matter as the movie has great energy, which is much more important. It’s the kind of energy you couldn’t even do these days, but not because of anything bad. At least not unironically. It’s just different sensibilities.

69. Sedmikrásky (Daisies) (Vera Chytilová, 1966, Czechoslovakia)

Two young women realize there’s something deeply wrong with the hierarchies of the world. They decide that it would be better to be on the winning side instead of where they are currently and then go on dates with rich men in order to get free meals.

This movie is said to have been banned in it’s native Czechoslovakia, but that isn’t really true. There was an MP who spoke against it for being obscene and thus the larger venues, who wanted to toe the line, wouldn’t show it any longer. You could still see it in smaller theaters, which apparently weren’t as afraid of the powerful.

There is a lot imagery of excesses the elite of this nominally socialist country. A lot of food in places many of the normal folk never had access to. At times they just destroy food as well. No wonder the MP got scared of this.

It didn’t seem to affect the career of the director too much. I wasn’t there to see, but she was able to make movies regularly after that as well, although I have also read that she was forced to direct ads under her husbands name for a while and there is definitely long periods of inactivity in her filmography after this. This was the difference between moviemaking in the west and in the east during the Cold War. Even George Lucas has talked about this openly. Moviemakers in the west were nominally more free, but they had (and still have) the pressure of making something commercially viable. In the east, they could experiment especially with technique. Sure, they could sometimes step on the wrong toes, but that apparently wouldn’t necessarily be their end either.

Much of this movie is just weirdness. The two main characters, Marie and Marie, just cause chaos in their own seemingly innocent and naive way, a role they seem to be able to pull off easily. It does allow them to find men, who think they are harmless. It’s hard to say how much of this is just them being them and how much is them using their “feminine viles” on their unsuspecting, but very deserving victims.

Sometimes they do manage to put themselves into somewhat difficult situations, when they have led a man on for too long and they have expectations. In a way this would be nice fuel for the manosphere, but that would actually require them to step outside of the MCU for movies.

That would also be a very wrongheaded reading of the movie. Sure, the two women do take advantage of men, but the men also think they are taking advantage of the women. The women might be in the wrong here from some perspective, but the men created the hierarchy they themselves are using for their own benefit. The women are just playing the game with the cards they were dealt.

The two Maries do get their comeuppance at the end, but it feels hollow. It feels like pushing against other kinds of norms, instead of real indictment of the two.

There is a queer reading of the movie as well. The two leads are comfortable around each other, at times even physically (like when they bathe together). Is this just them being familiar and used to each other or is there lesbian tension? I think either interpretation has merit.

68. Se7en (David Fincher, 1995, USA)

Detective Mills is reassigned to a department that’s bad at the best of times at the worst possible time. His partner, Somerset, is on his way to retirement with the enthusiasm of someone visiting a dentist, and Mills is in no way prepared to the depravity of the serial killer, who’s work is their first case.

It is weird that Somerset is just so desensitized that he has an edge here. That inability to feel is often seen as part of the deal with the main character, but here there is a tragedy to it. Somerset is unable to enjoy life, as it has all become empty due to the monstrous people he has had to deal with throughout his career. He isn’t portrayed as a badass, who is above it all. He is portrayed as someone who has had to learn to live with it and it has cost him dearly.

Mills is eager, which is drives a wedge initially between the two men. A sort of peace is negotiated by Mills’s wife, which Mills begrudgingly accepts and which turns out to be important in the big picture.

The serial killer is on a crusade. He is killing people based on the seven deadly sins, which in this case are gluttony, greed, sloth, lust, pride, envy and wrath. Since the theme is feminist analysis, it is interesting to look at how these sins relate to genders.

There’s four male and three female victims, but it is not that straightforward. One of the female victims, Mills’s wife, is not seen as a sinner, but instead her murder is the sin that leads to Mills committing the act of wrath or punishing the murderer’s wrath, if you want to look at it that way.

The two other women are lust and pride. Is there inherent misogyny here? And if so, is that misogyny by the murderer or the writer? I think it’s the murderer in the first case and the writer in the second case.

Lust is a woman, who has been raped with a dildo with blades attached to it. The murderer didn’t do it himself, but forced someone else to do it instead. Since the victim was a prostitute, it would seem that the way the murdered sees things here is that the woman was in some way responsible for enticing her johns into lust, which is typical for religious people.

Pride is a model, who has been disfigured and thus kills herself rather than live with her new face. Does this actually happen? Well, yes and no. According to the National Library of Medicine, there is a higher risk of suicide, but that is linked to the depression many of these victims experience, so it wouldn’t happen immediately, but months or years afterwards, after they have tried to learn to live with their disfigurement.

That wouldn’t work very well for the purposes of the movie, but at the same time, that might have been an interesting take as well: what if the murdered assumed she would kill herself, but she doesn’t? It would show us that perhaps the worldview of the murderer is not based on reality.

Of course, that would be a different movie. This goes fully into portraying the world as disgusting and its the people who have made is such. This is the strength of the movie. It should still be understood that the filmmakers were ready to throw women under the bus for their purposes.

But here’s a story, you should take with a grain of salt, as it is directly from Fincher: He said he was reading the script for the first time and he reaches the point where John Doe comes to the police station to give himself up. Fincher notices that there’s still a bunch of pages left in the script and thinks to himself that this is not the way things should be.

It is different. Catching the criminal does not end the suffering, which mirrors the world. The trauma still remains or in this case, as it often happens with serial killers, the extent of their crimes is only revealed after he begins to confess to them.

Did John Doe win? Yes, but question is to what extent? He managed to manipulate Mills into killing him, thus finalizing his work. There were seven victims as intended. So, he won. However, this changes how Somerset sees things. He decides not to retire. Does he now continue the work started by John Doe? I’m not saying he will become a serial killer himself (which would be an absurd asumption), but in a way he continues a crusade against sinners, even if only of a specific kind. At the same time, we do want murders to be solved, so in a way this is a win for society as well, even if ACAB.

67. Hagazussa (Lukas Feigelfeld, 2017, Austria)

Hagazussa is an ancient German word for a witch used in Austria, where this movie is from.

As a child, Albrun and her mother were harassed by the local villagers, who assumed the two were witches. Now, she’s an adult with her own child, living alone in the same cabin and still being harassed. She longs for human contact and when she is betrayed by a woman she thought to be her friend, Albrun resorts to any methods available to her with tragic results.

I’ll get deeper into this in another entry later on, because there’s a movie which is based on it, but there’s a book, Satanism and Witchcraft from 1862, which claims that women became witches, because they didn’t have other choices. It was the only way they could gain any sort of control over their lives in Feudal Europe.

It should also be remembered that witch trials of the late medieval period and early New Age were largely driven by the need to control women. Midwives, who would often have a lot of different roles in their villages as sort of wise women, would often be the first targets of such persecution, as they were outside of the church influence.

Albrun’s persecution has nothing to do with this. It’s just purely discriminating soneone weaker then themselves. Calling her a witch is just an excuse to do it openly and without societal repercussions. Actually, in a situation such as this, there might be repercussions for not joining in on the persecution. This kind of bullying is just a form of enforcing ones place in the social hierarchy.

Albrun is desperate to begin with. She’s lonely, sexually frustrated and practically an outlaw (in it’s original sense, meaning actually outside of the legal protections of the law) without having done anything to deserve that punishment. Even the local priest thinks of her as a sacrilege, which needs to be stamped out.

She finds the power for her revenge in where Pagans of all kinds have found it for millenia: hallucinogenics. (Is Pagan still PC? Should I be calling them by another name? I think it has been reclaimed, but that might mean I shouldn’t use it, even if certain Christians would count us atheists Pagans as well.) Mushrooms were a source of insight into deeper mysteries of the universe.

One might argue that this movie is a rape revenge flick in the tradition of I Spit on Your Grave (originally Day of the Woman). The way Albrun is betrayed is that her “friend” brings in a man to rape her. The thing is that the revenge just isn’t cutting it here. It doesn’t bring any kind of real disclosure. It’s just the first step in her downfall. The trauma she has accumulated all her life breaks her completely.

I would also like to note that Aleksandra Cwen, who plays Albrun and carries the film on her shoulders, received a very deserved Weirdcademy award for her portrayal. Sadly, this isn’t an award recognized by nearly anyone as an important distiction. She hasn’t found much work in movies after this, although her IMDb bio says she works quite a bit. Maybe that’s theatre work.

66. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (Guy Maddin, 2002, Canada)

Its Dracula, but as a 20s German expressionistic ballet. What else is there to say? Either you are intrigued or you are shouting WTF at your display right now, but I would assume most of you, who actually are reading this, are going to be of the former group. Otherwise I would assume the list would have put you off already.

Is there more to say? Yes. Of course. There’s a lot to say about Dracula, for one.

In general, you learn the language of different genres by watching movies of that genre. In this particular case, this is in a genre of its own. Ballet horror. I know a lot about horror, but nothing about ballet. Part of my fascination with this film is probably just based on this peculiarity.

But in order to read the movie, I don’t think understanding horror or ballet is important, but it does seem to rely on knowing Dracula as a story. It doesn’t exactly explain anything and the language of ballet is very abstract anyhow. Of course, if you just enjoy the movement or the expressionistic way it is presented, that can be an enjoyable experience on it’s own.

So, how does Dracula treat its women? We have two important female characters: Lucy and Mina. Both of them are put in the role of victims here. Damsels to be rescued. But this is the male perspective. Are the British men of this story just so afraid of exotic men stealing their women that they have had to concoct this complicated situation? Wei-Qiang Zhang, who plays Dracula, has Chinese roots, so he is very exotic in this context of late-19th century London (which was very much a multi-cultural city even back then). I tried to look into Wei-Qiang Zhang, but there isn’t much information about him available and Wei-Qiang Zhang seems to be a relatively common name as there are a lot of different kind of results, but he is a senior ballet master at Royal Winnipeg Ballet and knows both Chinese and English at native level, which would imply that he was born into an Chinese immigrant family living in Canada, but that’s just speculation. He obviously has Asian features.

You could also say that Dracula offers the two women a path to experiment with their sexuality in a way the stuffy upper class Brits just can’t. Sure, there are risks involved, but that’s what freedom does.

Except that the freedom is an illusion. The women in Dracula’s castle are his slaves. They can’t do what they want or go where they please. One would assume the same fate is waiting for Lucy and Mina as well. At least Lucy. Mina seems to be more of an object of fascination for him, but that could go either way. She could feel the imprisonment even more than the other women, or she could have some control over him, which she could use to her benefit. However, eternity is a long time, so it is possible he would just be bored of her at some point and then she would just be another concubine.

Is their fate after being rescued that different? They get married, have children and sit at home while their husbands get to go out and be active? Because of the difficulties of going outside (like the lack of public toilets), upper class women were often confined to their homes. Its almost as if the Brits need to make Dracula into a monster in order to explain why life with them is better.

This is a movie by Guy Maddin, a weird fellow from Winnipeg, Canada. I am not his biggest fan. In fact, quite the opposite. I often find his movies just a little bit too contrived. On the other hand, I do like some of his movies as well, like this one. He is just very hit or miss for me.

65. Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear) (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953, France)

Somewhere in South America, an oil field catches on fire. The plan is to stop the fire through explosions (a method that has been used in reality, as the point is to burn all the oxygen around the fire to put it out). However, the nitroglyserin needed for this needs to be transported through the jungle on shitty roads. So, who is willing to do this? The most desperate men. They hire four of them into teams of two, who then risk their lives for a life-changing amount of money, even if it isn’t enough for most people to even think about risking their lives for.

Hitchcock might have been known as the Master of Suspense, but he was actually afraid of losing that title to Clouzot. You know what? He should have. While I have my problems with the conduct of each of these men (and if they were alive, cancelling would be the only option), Clouzot’s movies are just that much more intense.

On the other hand, I think you could also argue that Clouzot has the maximum, while Hitchcock was much more consistent in his output. On the other hand, I’ve only seen a handful of Clouzot’s movies, while I’ve seen around 40 Hitchcock movies (some of which are actually quite bad), so it is possible that the ubiquity of Hitchcock (and the ease of finding his movies during the early days of DVDs) is the actual reason I’ve formed this opinion.

But yeah, this is an intense movie. Death is always just a one small mistake away and the men are always aware of it. We also get to see the care with which the nitro is handled, just so we know what to expect.

The drivers are not some heroic characters. They are here, because they aren’t just down on their luck. They are hopeless. They are stuck in a small village in the middle of nowhere with no prospects or money.

The only named woman in the movie is Linda, played by Clouzot’s wife, Vera. She is in there only in the beginning before the actual story starts. She is involved with one of the men, but he is just being an asshole and for the worst reasons as well. He starts to be dismissive towards her after meeting a newly arrived older man, with whom he forms a quick partnership of sorts. This doesn’t really feel like a good idea in an environment, where women are rare and desperate men are everywhere… unless it’s supposed to be read as queercoded.

Is that queercoding? I don’t really know, but I do know there are people, who definitely would read it that way and I’m not against it. If it is queercoding, it isn’t the most healthy form of it. I don’t see anyone shipping them. (For those of my generation, “shipping” is like fantasizing about a relationship between characters, which doesn’t explicitly exist, like Cumberbatch’s Holmes and Freeman’s Watson on Sherlock probably being the most famous example.)

The two teams actually make the movie very interesting. There’s, of course, two of them, because only one needs to make it. So, we know one of them might very well die. However, the two teams are on very different journeys. One of them meets puzzles and needs to solve them. The other is more dramatic pairing, as one of them starts to fear uncontrollably. This latter one is the queercoded one from above. The newly arrived older man finds it hard to keep it together, which creates a nice contrast to the other team’s professionalism.