Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

 The hype surrounding Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026, Jane Schoenbrun) is justified.  The movie is thought-provoking and entertaining.  It's a thesis film, that is, a declaration of theoretical principles. None of this is occult -- the movie announces itself as an application of "queer theory" to a disreputable genre of film, that is, the "sleepaway camp" slasher movie.  In these pictures, a group of good-looking and horny teens are stalked by a mad killer at an isolated summer camp.  While engaging in sex, or the prelude to sex, the lecherous kids are slaughtered.  In the end, a final girl, often one who is chaste and has not participated in the erotic free-for-all, confronts the monstrous serial murderer.  After a gory battle, the final girl survives, although the monster, representing forces in the Id that are immortal and inextinguishable, limps away to fight another day -- thus, authorizing an indefinite number of sequels if the specific formula is successful at the box-office.  

Teenage Sex is overtly didactic.  In effect, it's a lecture in theory with gruesome illustrations, a sort of slasher-movie slide lecture.  Blood spurts in geysers that are 30 feet high, heads literally role, and people are hacked and impaled to the point that the camera lens is so splashed with gore that the images are reduced to Mark Rothko-style fields of red.  Here are the propositions that all this mayhem declares:  (1) Monsters are created when sexuality is repressed; (2) Repressed sexuality erupts into violence and lurid carnage (blood spurts volcanically out of bisected bodies and severed necks); (3) Movies, specifically horror films exploit sexual repression by showing us the "return of the repressed"; (4) Murder in slasher-movies involving "nubile" (the word is used in the film) teenagers, represents a fear of being sexually penetrated; (5) Geysers of blood signify sexual release or orgasm; (6) The visual dynamic of films of this genre involve voyeurism, peeping at bodies through occluded fields of vision (generally supported by heavy breathing on the soundtracks); (7) Horror movies are about "desire and fluids" -- this is stated directly by a main character in the film played by Gillian Anderson; (8) The dynamic of pleasure involves both seeing covertly and desiring to be seen; expressed in other words, sexual pleasure requires that one desire to penetrate the beloved as well as wish to be penetrated; (9) In sexual intercourse, the distinction between subject and object is blurred and becomes irrelevant; (10) One achieves orgasm by inducing the state of mind that one is both active (an agent) and passive (a submissive victim) in the act of love.  -- Much of this is questionable but it makes sense in the context of the movie.  In summary, the film's theoretical underpinnings sound a bit dry -- however, the movie is moist, even wet to the pont of gushing.  If we trace the way that gender is customarily expressed in our culture, the male principle is thought to be active and opposed to the passive female.  Teenage Sex dramatizes the proposition that orgasm can't be attained without the bisexual principle of being, at once, active and passive, that is, predator and prey at the same time or, even more radically, one that imagines that he or she is raping by being raped.  

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a feted lesbian or bisexual filmmaker. She is obviously a surrogate for the director Janet Schoenbrun whose previous well-reviewed movies involve psycho-sexual elements.  The formative experience in Kris' sexual life was watching the first of the series of Camp Miasma movies (it is a "franchise" boasting no fewer than eight pictures) when she was eight or nine.  Playing the DVD in the middle of the night, the little girl is fascinated by the look in the eyes of the final girl when she climaxes just before her boyfriend, who is atop her, is impaled.  Kris wants to produce the re-boot of the Camp Miasma movies consistent with "Queer Movie Theory" and, further, intends to cast the "final girl" who is now a 60 year old woman in the picture.  She goes to upstate Washington, near the Canadian border, where she locates the actress, now a recluse living "off the grid" in the deep mountain forest.  The "final girl," Billy has grown into Gillian Anderson who is stately, beautiful, and sinister; she speaks with a heavy southern accent a bit like the detective in the "Knifes Out" pictures.  Billy is living in the location and compound of Camp Tivoli, a sleepaway camp that was used as the set for Camp Miasma in the first film.  After the success of the first movie, Billy has retired and not been seen on screen for thirty years.  (At the time of the movie, she says that she was 24 playing 17.)  Billy is described as eccentric and mysterious, like the figure played by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.  Kris drives to the camp, gets her SUV stuck in the snow, and hikes the rest of the way to the compound where Billy is living alone, but with a "cinema" next to her cabin.  Anderson as Billy makes a grand entrance just at the moment when Kris says to herself "this is where I expect a jump-scare" -- she is dressed like a femme fatale in a fifties' noir wearing an extravagant broad-brimmed hat.  The camp is filmed as a movie set with fake snow and mountainous landscape obviously painted on flats around the buildings.  Kris importunes Billy to agree to appear in the re-boot.  Billy resists but there is a sexual charge about their encounter which involves eating Kentucky Fried Chicken (filmed in lavish sexulaized close-ups like the famous eating scene in Tom Jones) and smoking a big marijuana spliff.  Gradually, a romance blossoms between the two women.  Kris admits that she can't achieve orgasm and that she feels remote from her own body.  The two women go into the "cinema" or screening shack to watch the old movie.  In the middle of the screening, the power goes out.  Candles are lit and there is a tentative sexual encounter that is aborted when Kris can't respond to Billy's caresses.  

The killer in the Miasma series of films is called "Little Death", of course, the French euphemism for orgasm.  "Little Death" is a burlesque figure.  He's a scrawny guy who runs around with his face hidden behind a metal ventilator duct, a reference, I think, to the voyeuristic aspect of teenage slasher movies -- someone is always peeping at the teenagers through underbrush or hiding in the HVAC vents. Little Death comes out of the center of the lake next to the camp.  He is immortal and rises from the water like the Lady of the Lake in John Boorman's Excalibur wielding a long razor-sharp spear.  The spear seems to have magical properties -- if it touches you, your flesh explodes into geysers of blood.  The sex between the women has a activated Little Death.  It turns out that the lake has a hole in its bottom and Little Death lives in marginally furnished room, naked and with some moldering furniture and a big flat screen TV -- it's a set smuggled in from Twin Peaks.  The hole in the lake, which is portrayed as a ray of light extending up through the turbid water, is said to be the place where movies come from.  Little Death emerges from the lake and slaughters Kris' vulgar and condescending producers who have appeared for a one minute cameo at the camp before being dissolved into explosions of gore.  Kris' girlfriend and her bisexual partner, Thor, also both comical figures, have made the trip as well from LA to the camp and are wiped out after another 20 seconds.  (These scenes, and much of the snowy ambience of the film, are related to Kubrick's The Shining, particularly the scene where a man with clairvoyant abilities travels with great difficulty to the Overlook Hotel and, then, is axed out of the picture in less than a minute of screen-time.  Teenage Sex's structure also harkens to the Kubrick horror movie -- the episodes are labeled "Monday," "Tuesday" and so on.)  The murders excite the two women and they have sex amidst rose petals and candles.  Little Death appears and impales Billy. Billy vomits about six gallons of blood all over Kris who, finally, achieves a full-blown orgasm in this arduous manner.  The next morning both women wake up, none the worse for wear but covered from head to toe with dried gore.  They go into town and buy some candies and chips to fuel their ardent sexual affair.  Some children are playing with squirt guns and none of the townspeople seem to notice that both women are painted red from head to toe.. Little Death is gone for the moment, but, of course, will arise from his underwater lair again.  In one scene, Kris says that it's her fantasy to be the "final girl" half-naked and fleeing Little Death with her "tits bouncing" as she runs.  We get to see Kris running in slow motion with her breasts flopping up and down, wearing panties and a transparent tee-shirt just before the sex scene with Billy.  In that scene, Kris confesses that she wants to be the victim of penetration by Little Death, a desire that the film fulfills -- although without fatal consequence, since as Billy says, "it's all play."

The movie is a wonky mash-up of teenage slasher movies, Kubrick, and David Lynch with elements of David Cronenberg as well -- for instance, Little Death plays DVDS in his lair by pushing them into a vaginal-shaped slit, a bit like the belly DVD player in Videodrome.  Some of the music and the Pacific Northwest setting invoke both Lynch's Twin Peaks and his Blue Velvet which as a similar psycho-sexual and sado-masochistic theme.  The film is something to behold and driven by the fiercely committed performances of Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder.  It's often very funny and I recommend it without reservation.  

My Sad Dead

 My Sad Dead, a 2026 supernatural mini-series shot in Buenos Aires, is an excellent illustration of something that streaming services do very well. A program of this sort, made cheaply but with great panache, allows the director to experiment with material that might not be viable as a feature film.  Another example of this sort of mini-series are the three seasons of Paolo Sorrentino's The Young Pope, an extraordinary program that, in terms of its length and sophistication, would not be possible in any other form.  Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie's remarkable The Curse, similarly, is an innovative program that probably couldn't have been made except for streaming or cable TV.  It's my contention that if Alejandro Innaritu's Digger had been released on cable or streaming, the show would have been greeted with rapturous acclaim and accorded universal plaudits.  As it is, the stench of commercial failure around Digger taints the air in the theater and puts both the Mexican master-director and poor Tom Cruise in a bad odor.  My Sad Dead, directed and written by the great Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain, is an example of a production that would not be commercially viable in movie theaters despite the show's manifest excellence -- the risk of failure, however, doesn't hover this four-part mini-series, about 200 minutes long, since Netflix has paid for the film and doesn't require an exorbitant box-office to make the venture profitable.  

Ema is a capable but disgraced doctor working in a large and chaotic Buenos Aires hospital.  She's rumored to have triaged viable COVID patients by diverting resources from the dying to those with a chance of living. (Ema seems harried and has a prickly personality; she is like the great character actress Thelma Ritter from Pickup on Sixth Street. From her earliest childhood, Ema has, to use the parlance of The Sixth Sense, seen dead people.  The dead wail and howl and moan in this movie, a sonic backdrop like the unsettling sounds that we hear in The Zone of Interest.  Mostly the dead are inconsolable, but Ema, in her own way (as with her COVID patients) tries to help those who can be reached -- she gently guides them to places that they can haunt without being overly intrusive and, in fact, helpful to the living. In the opening scene, we see Ema's elderly mother Susanna dying in agony.  It's a family trait that Ema and Susanna and her daughter, Cora, can't tolerate morphine.  The horrible pain afflicting Ema's mother has caused her to scream to the point that she has destroyed her vocal cords -- and then, she screams without vocal cords.  Death doesn't help much.  She still sits around Ema's house morosely, moaning and weeping in a high-pitched, child's voice.  

Emas's daughter, Cora, is a photographer.  She is involved in filming some kind of a music video (she is taking still shots) in a very bad neighborhood a few blocks from where Ema lives.  The neighborhood is what we would call in the States, "the projects" and it's rife with hip hop and crime.  Into this milieu comes Tomas and Lila with their enormously fat daughter Julie.  Lila is Ema's sister who lives in Portland, Oregon and she's practical, self-absorbed, and doesn't see dead people.  Julie, who is huge and bloated, is about 24 and wears a red football jersey with the letter 12 on it, marked "Namath."  Julie is miserable and mentally ill.  She has been hospitalized many times without any real benefit as to her schizophrenia.  Julie is a nuisance because she has noisy sex nightly for hours at a time with apparitions that she calls her "friends".  It's not clear whether these apparitions are purely imaginary or, perhaps, the ghosts of the dead, because, like Ema, she can see her "triste muertos" ("the sad dead").  There's a big hexagonal shaped water-tower built above the block of condominiums where Ema lives.  After attending a neighborhood meeting of some kind with Julie, Ema mentions something to the obese girl about the water tower.  So, in a driving rainstorm, Julie climbs up onto the top of building, hoists herself up a ladder, and, then, hurls her body face-first into the murky reservoir in the tower.  Some criminals gun down three pretty girls who are shopping for clothing with money given them by Cora for posing for pictures for her.  (In a way, Cora is indirectly responsible for the death of the girls -- in this film, everyone is sort of indirectly responsible for everyone else's misery.)  We, then, see the enormous Julie having vigorous sex with three or four apparitions, who may include the girls shot down for the money Cora gave them.  (This remarkable sequence occurs before Julie drowns herself in the water tower.)

No one knows where Julie has gone.  Ultimately Lila and Tomas return to Portland.  Ema wanders the streets, shot in languorous long tracking scenes, looking in a desultory way for Julie.  The streets are filled with choruses of howling dead; the sound track quivers with dolorous strings and wailing ghosts.  Cora can now see the dead a little bit and she chats with her taciturn dead grandmother.  In an alley, she goes to the place where her lover died from a heroin overdose and sits with her head on the ghost's lap.  Up in the water tower, Julie is rotting -- skin flakes off her face and feet and fills the reservoir with lacy bits of decomposing flesh.  The corpse-juice in the water, apparently, affects anyone who drinks it and slowly more and more people can see ghosts.  Ema figures out that Julie is rotting in the water tower, verifies that she is floating there, now sentient as a ghost.  Lila and Tomas return to look for Julie.  Ema reports that there is a corpse rotting in the communities' water, but this being Buenos Aires, no one really does anything for several weeks.  Tomas sings John Denver's song "Country Roads" in the shower.  Later, in a bravura tour-de-force, the camera tracks in circles as a crowd of ambulances, fire trucks and emergency workers convene on the water tower to hoist Julies' rotting body out of the reservoir -- these images are scored to John Denver's pop song. (A similar sequence occurs in the fourth episode scored to a perky pop tune by Shakira.) There's no resolution to any of the subplots, many of which I haven't mentioned.  Julie reappears as a ghost and continues to have sex with her "friends" whom she thought had abandoned her -- hence, the suicide in the water tower.  Susanna, Ema's old mother, seems reconciled to being dead and her pain has lessened -- she now sits placidly at the dinner table with Ema and Cora who has moved in with them.  After a particularly vigorous bout of group sex, Julie also sits at the dinner table, smiling shyly and contentedly, as she watches the two living women eat their supper.  Larrain provides a shot of elephantine Julie completely nude, facing the camera like some sort of prehistoric fertility goddess.   It's unclear whether the final scene at the dinner table is a vision of Hell or a glimpse of some sort of perverse heaven.

The tone of the film is assured, morbid, and elliptical.  The picture is shot on overexposed film so that everything is pale, ghostlike, and seems bleached-out.  Larrain blurs the faces of the dead so that with their open screaming mouths they look like paintings by Francis Bacon -- particularly the artist's "Screaming Pope (after Velasquez)".  In longer shots, the dead are everywhere, sitting half-naked on park benches or staggering down hospital or bureaucratic corridors.  The movie has many shots that simply track Ema as she wanders about the mean streets -- there are as many moving shots of this kind as there are images of Jimmy Stewart driving his car in Vertigo, a movie that has some of the same ambience of My Sad Dead.  The film has something to do with grief, particularly the grief of those mourning the "disappeared" like Julie.  Julie's corpse taints the whole community and, briefly, causes everyone to see horrifying visions and apparitions.  But, at the end, things seem to have returned to some sort of macabre normality.  This is a remarkable movie, very bold with respect to its slow pace and unattractive, if realistic, bodies and faces.  Pablo Larrain is a great filmmaker and, although I don't exactly understand, My Sad Dead, I admire it greatly.

The Wailing (Goksung)

A Korean village is high in the misty mountains.  It is always raining, sometimes out of a clear sky.  The road to the village climbs in daunting, slippery switchbacks.  A car drives back and forth on the switchbacks.  The car contains a shaman who had been summoned to the town where there have been many gruesome murders.  In the village, the shaman goes to a home where a policeman's daughter, Hyo-Jin, is possessed by a demon.  The shaman orders the fat cop, Jong-goo, to drag a jug of soy-sauce down from where it is apparently fermenting on a hillside behind the house.  When the shaman breaks open the ceramic vat, the soy sauce washes out together with a big crow that has been steeping in the brew.  The handsome shaman nods his head and says:  "We've got a real wicked spirit here."  Indeed.

The Korean director, Na Hong-jin is currently enjoying a moment of fame in the West on the basis of his horror film (premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2026) Hope.  Reviews proclaim this new movie as the best thing since sliced bread.  On the basis of that acclaim, I decided to take a look Na Hong-jin's earlier (2016) horror picture, The Wailing.  It's a long and very elaborately produced picture clocking in at 2 hours and 36 minutes.  It's impressive in a sort of grim way, but confusing, needlessly gory, and ultimately extremely confusing.  (Large numbers of people ask Chat AI as to who is really responsible for the innumerable bloody killings in the film -- the AI, by the way, is also confused and the answer usually provided is not completely accurate.)  One's tolerance for this film will have something to do with whether you like pictures with a killing or suicide or zombie attack every ten minutes or so; the characters are always bathed in blood and about half the shots feature people performing with faces, heads and hands dripping with gore.  Curiously, the picture is not at all frightening.  It has several extremely grotesque images which are memorable, but the movie isn't interesting in scaring the audience.  It's effects are epic -- it's like the Iliad with one carefully depicted death after another, until in the end, the viewer is numb to it all.  By the end of the movie (which, in fact, has multiple endings), I didn't care at all who or why people were being slaughtered.  Sadly, there's nothing to really see here, although the movie is interesting in its cultural context and, certainly, can't be called boring although the whole thing is maddeningly repetitive.  And there is certainly lots and lots of anguished wailing.

A evil spirit is haunting a squalid little Korean town that doesn't look like it's progressed past the 13th century.  People go berserk for no reason and kill everyone in their families.  The killer, covered in their victim's blood, are comatose, having fallen into some sort of catatonic trance.  A plump, jolly cop named Jong-goo investigates the slayings.  After about the tenth killing one would expect the Korean Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (or something on that order) in Seoul to intervene.  No such luck: the hapless villagers are left to their own devices and ultimately have to enlist a Catholic seminarian (a priest in training) and an animist Shaman to deal (unsuccessfully) with the wicked forces in their village.  Jong-goo has sex with someone, possibly a girlfriend, in a car.  His daughter, an eleven-year old named Hyo-jin, has observed the act, but tells her daddy that "(she) won't tell anyone" about the transgression.  These events somehow expose Hyo-jin to demonic possession.  She ends up breaking out in a livid rash of suppurating sores and boils, eats ravenously, and threatens everyone around her with violent death.  The townspeople, and ultimately the cops as well, blame the supernatural molestation on a "Jap" -- that is, a Japanese tourist who occupies a remote cottage high in the hills and whom we have seen fishing in the opening scenes: there is a big close-up of him impaling a worm on a hook.  The Jap is reputed to be a demon, a suspicion that is confirmed seemingly, when the cop and his deputies go the man's cabin and find a sort of shrine in which there are photographs of the legions of people killed in town, both pictures of them alive and dead.  Meanwhile, there is a zombie in the form of a naked man running around the steep, forested hills wearing a "diaper" as it is called in the film.  The zombie attacks people from time to time and tears their flesh.  When not attacking people, the zombie eats raw meat from the corpses of dead deer in the forest.  It's always raining and people are soaked to the skin with rainwater when they're not covered in gore.  Houses get burned down; a woman hangs herself from a lone tree at the edge of the squalid village.  The shaman performs a ceremony involving the beheading of chickens and the sacrifice of a lamb as well as much dancing around a bonfire and pounding stakes into a wooden effigy.  Cross-cut with the shaman's ritual is another ceremony that the so-called Jap is performing in his mountain lodge -- he's got a myriad of candles around him, chants, and kills ravens and crows.  Neither of these two ceremonies has any real effect so far as I could see.  Jong-goo is half-insane with anxiety about his daughter.  He confronts the Jap, kills his dog, also a demonic-seeming black beast, and, then, later chases the man off a cliff in the mountains.  There's a gruesome zombie attack and the creature has to be killed with blows from a rake and other sharp tools. The cop finally catches the Jap and beats him to death, rolling him off a mountain side in the downpour.  (There's also a naked woman who runs around killing people and a young girl who squats on the roadway listlessly pitching stones at Jong-goo and his cops.) The shaman, who thinks his work is done after the Jap has been disposed of, leaves town, carrying a big Buddha in his backseat for protection.  A shower of bird droppings from ravens and crows (apparently) drives him back into town. The shaman, now, concludes that the real villain is a ghost woman dressed all in white who has appeared to haunt the town beginning about ninety minutes into the movie.  The seminarian leaves his Catholic church (the actual priest is helpless against the evil), goes to the Jap's ruinous cottage and discovers secret tunnels boring into the heart of the mountain.  In the tunnels, the Jap is still performing some sort of rituals although he is a bit the worse for wear from having been beaten, run over, and thrown off a cliff.  While the priest confronts the Jap in his candle-lit lair, Jong-goo encounters the woman in white, who probably is a ghost.  She tells him to run back home to keep the possessed girl, Hyo-jin, from killing everyone.  Jong-goo thinks she is trying to misdirect him because he has been told by the shaman that the ghost is the source of all mischief and that they murdered the wrong man, the innocent Jap.  She says that the murders will occur when the cock crows three times.  It's dawn with yellowish-red light seeping over the tops of the green and ragged mountains.  The cock crows three times and Jong-goo runs home to find his wife and mother-in-law stabbed to death by the insane Hyo-jin.  Jong-goo's encounter with the malign ghost is intercut with the seminarian's confrontation with the Jap in the underground tunnel.  The sun rises.  Jong-goo remembers happier days with his little daughter, a ride at a fair in which the cop tells her not to be afraid because her daddy will protect her.

The movie is certainly atmospheric and skillfully shot and edited.  The acting consists mostly of wailing and other lamentations and there are a number of scary exorcism scenes involving Hyo-jin that are disturbing in their implications of child abuse. I haven't revealed the film's ending but it doesn't matter -- no one seems to understand it anyway.  Every well-made horror movie implies a theology or, at least, a metaphysics.  Because of cultural differences, I can't figure out the theology underlying this movie although theological concerns are clearly visible: the movie begins with an epigraph from the Gospel of Luke at Chapter 24, something about Jesus' resurrected body not being that of a ghost -- you can touch him and feel his flesh which is not true of ghosts.  The film juxtaposes animistic rites performed by the opportunistic shaman -- he wants $10,000 for the big ceremony involving the chickens and goat (which doesn't work anyway)-- with a Christian understanding of evil:  the movie involves a literal appearance by the Devil.  The constant rainfall is oppressive and the scenes involving killings are shot in low-light in wretched huts and agricultural buildings -- there's a great deal of junk crowding the frame.  Ordinarily, with the exception of zombie attacks, we don't see any actual killing, just the aftermath of the mayhem.  I don't understand the movie on some fundamental level and the whole thing seems merely gratuitous to me.  In my estimation the movie's extreme length and the fact that it has several apparent endings (and there was another ending as well, shot but not released) shows that the directorm Na Hong-jin is not in control of this material and doesn't exactly know what he intends.                           

Disclosure Day

 On a level of sheer film-craft, Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day is nonpareil.  Something about space aliens and malign governmental secrecy triggers Spielberg's imagination.  He directs Disclosure Day with the vigor of his youth -- there are car chases in the picture choreographed as spectacularly as similar scenes in the director's first film, Sugarland Express, a movie that I saw as a sophomore in college 52 years ago.  Viewed objectively, the story in Disclosure Day is nonsensical.  But it doesn't matter; you can't view the movie objectively when Spielberg comes at you firing on all cylinders.  The complicated movie that is nearly 2 1/2 hours long zips by in the blink of an eye.  Although the story doesn't make sense, Spielberg keeps all the elements of the intricate narrative coherent from scene to scene and shot to shot -- if the whole thing is absurd this isn't immediately visible to an audience enchanted by the movie's pyrotechnics, whiplash editing, and emotional force.  (I had a similar reaction to Spielberg's film maudit, 1941 which is extraordinary in its details and zany mise-en-scene but, otherwise, I think empty -- it doesn't matter during the experience; but you feel a wee bit ashamed after the adrenalin rush wears off.)

Spielberg takes some remarkable liberties with his audience in Disclosure Day -- you can't figure out what is going on, even in broad terms, for about a half-hour.  The full contours of the plot aren't revealed until the last fifteen minutes of the long picture.  The audience has to accept the chaos of motion and light and color on the faith that it will all make some sense by the end of the movie.  And, in fact, Spielberg delivers on the promise -- the picture's story is, more or less, clear by the end of the film.  A close observer would notice that there are certain plot points that aren't elucidated -- for instance, we get references to mysterious "experiencers", a concept important enough to foreground in a portentous way without any shred of explanation (as far as I could see) in the picture.  But, by and large, the welter of chases, car crashes, and state-of-the-art special effects pays off in the film's climax.  The gist of the thing is that a sinister governmental agency has possession of the space aliens that crashed at Roswell, as well as other visitors from outer space -- true to space-alien lore, the creatures come in two styles, the small child-sized "little greys" and the tall, spider-like "big whites."  The government has concealed its interactions with the space men for three-quarters of a century and has been conducted cruel vivisection experiments on some of the alien pilots plucked living from their crashed vessels.  (The aliens are apparently very bad drivers and have crashed their flying saucers all over the planet.)  By reverse engineering, the government appears to have created some sort of "device" (as it is called) that imparts magical powers to its users -- the device looks like a tiny version of the monolith in 2001, a sort of detached rectangular handle.  Although this instrument is called "the device" by the characters in the film, they might as well name it "the MacGuffin".  Everyone is seeking the MacGuffin and efforts to discover and control the "device" are the main engine that drives the plot. (The "device" is the film's deus ex machina -- it gets characters out of predicaments by inducing telepathy, hallucinations, telekinetic effects, and, also, is a Tarnhelm of the kind imagined by Wagner -- if you're holding it, you are invisible  Daniel Kellner, a refugee from the evil government agency (it's called Wardex), is contacted at a professional wrestling match with information about his girlfriend Jane, an ex-nun who is held prisoner by Wardex.  Kellner rescues Jane after some adventures and flees with the Wardex convoy of big black SUVs in hot pursuit.  Kellner and Jane hide at a convent where a dignified older nun speculates on the effects that knowledge of space aliens would have on religion.  The Wardex caravan attacks again and Jane drops out of the film until its end.  Kellner goes on the run but knows, via Jane's telepathy, that he needs to end up at KCXE, obviously the call letters for a TV station but something that Kellner, a math whiz but otherwise not too bright can't figure out until the movie's last act.  Kellner is a member of a cabal that opposes Wardex -- this group of conspirators, the good guys in the movie, is led by a Black scientist, who like Kellner,is a disgruntled Wardex employee.  Twelve of the Wardex employees have called in sick as the movie begins and these people are the counter-force to the governmental agency.  Time is of the essence because the world is ending.  Some sort of nuclear crisis has occurred involving North Korea.  This has resulted in public panic -- we see convenience stores with gas pumps overrun by desperate people.  These scenes harken back to the panicked crowds in Close Encounters of the Third Kind  Meanwhile a weather-girl on a Kansas City Tv station (you got it! KCEX) is having weird seizure-like fits -- sometimes, she suddenly speaks in Mandarin Chinese and, in the middle of a weather forecast, she begins to click and pop like a Hottentot, delivering her words in the lingo of the space aliens.  She is sensitive to the space alien influences and may be an "experiencer" whatever this is supposed to mean.  The weather-girl, named something like Margaret Fairchild, has a useless boyfriend (he's planning to leave her).  She also has to flee when government agents appear and, ultimately, she hooks up with Daniel Kellner who is also on the run.  The boyfriend, like Jane, drops out of the movie although he doesn't get a cameo at the climax.  After various chases, filmed ecstatically by Spielberg, the principals converge on the KCEX studio where the weather-lady goes on the air, playing an archive of footage of government agents persecuting hapless aliens or pulling their bodies out of the wreckage of their flying saucers.  The weather-lady, who can persuade people to do things for her by calling up secret memories from their lives, faces the camera.  A wall of images from other stations shows the world on fire from the nuclear crisis.  The weather-lady's feed infiltrates all stations world-wide.  It's intimated that her message that the space people are among us will be a universal panacea and will save the world from the nuclear crisis -- all earthlings will now be brothers.  A ten-foot tall White is carried into the studio on a palanquin as if the creature is a imperial King.  The weather-lady glares sternly at the screen and orders the world to "Listen!"  And, so, the movie ends.  The bad guys associated with Wardex are led by a bearded gent named Scanlon.  Scanlon clearly is a surrogate for Spielberg, the bearded Prospero who has set this plot in motion, and, now, at the end of the movie, watches the footage of the aliens with benign impassivity, sitting in what seems to be a director's chair in the studios in Kansas City.  Along with Buster Keaton, Steven Spielberg is American cinema's greatest master of showing us how things work -- his films are set in a physical world in which objects have real weight and mass; scenes are, often, a matter of levers and gears and collisions that ricochet across the screen.  I'll cite one scene that I greatly admired as an example:  early in the movie, Kellner has to destroy a phone that could be used to track his whereabouts.  He pitches the phone out the car-window intending to drive over it.  But the phone is small and driving over it would require backing with some precision, something not possible with the bad guys hot on your heels.  Kellner backs up but misses the phone with the tires.  (The audience, if I am representative, immediately wonders whether Kellner will be able to crush the phone since it's in a location invisible to him, lying behind the back bumper.)  When he misses the phone, Jane tells him to try again.  He pulls back farther so the phone is in front of him and drives forward, but, again, misses the phone.  Jane has to get out and place the phone directly in front of the rear tires for Kellner to actually destroy it.  This little interlude is hyper-realistic and assures the movie that real-life factors as to distance and visibility will be decisive the movie's staging of events -- it's like the scene of Buster Keaton laboriously clearing the tracks of obstructions while riding on the cow-catcher of the locomotive in The General.  Similarly, Spielberg creates suspense and anxiety in his audience by means of a simple expedient:  he stages scenes in which the hero is trying to conceal himself with the protagonist in clear sight of the bad guys -- if he can see them, then, surely they can see him.  You want to shout at the hero to duck down or hide, but, instead, he darts around in a way in which we understand that if the bad guys simply turn around, they will see him.  

The movie is weird on many different levels.  What do the space men want?  On the evidence of the film, they want to transform our world into a simulacrum of a Hitchcock movie like The 39 Steps or North by Northwest -- that is, a witty, stylish, and exciting chase film.  There are curious hints of Freud in the movie's notion that both the weather-lady and Daniel Kellner are repressing childhood trauma relating to encounters with the aliens.  In order to free the characters from their repression, the good guys build an actual movie set, a house that simulates the weather-lady's home from which she was actually abducted by the aliens and, then, apparently, probed in some way.  In other words, the analyst, here the enemies of Wardex, must trigger an abreaction by confronting the weather-lady with an exact model of the home from which she was abducted.  (Characteristically, the weather-lady recalls singing a song from a Disney Movie before the little Greys appear to snatch her away to an operating room managed by one of the tall Whites.)  Kellner's childhood apparition involved a noble-looking stag, a fox, a raccoon, and a brilliantly red cardinal -- these friendly critters were, in fact, aliens in disguise and, as the tall White is operating on the weather-girl, the stag appears to comfort her.  There are astounding set pieces:  a car gets pushed by the villains into a freight- train and is entrapped by the train, pulled along the right-of-way at 60 mph as an oncoming train roars forward on the track a few feet away.  There are stunning car chases, fleets of vehicles dancing on the highway and the dirt roads.  The film's climax, the disclosure day, takes place in the studio of a TV station -- it's as if Spielberg is signaling us that if we are worthy of salvation, we will be saved by images broadcast to us by TV and films.  (The movie retains Spielberg's naivety about the power of film imagery -- if the "disclosure day" broadcast preempted a professional football game, there would, indeed, be riots but not based on panic or fear but rather founded in pique that that the game has been interrupted with such boring stuff as pictures of space aliens.  In the end, we aren't worthy of Spielberg's generosity -- I say this with humility and earnestly as well.  The film is miraculous, beautiful, and idiotic as well.  He remains in his old age one of history's greatest movie-makers and, like the best of them, the power of images and the camera moving on crane or tracks, makes all other considerations irrelevant.  I've been watching pictures by Samuel Fuller recently.  Everything Fuller does, Spielberg does better and with more conviction.  Fuller starts The Naked Kiss with a flurry of blows and punches thrown right at the camera; Spielberg begins Disclosure Day with a 400 pound wrestler beating the camera which is pummeled out of the ring, body-slammed, and smashed over the head with a folding chair.  Fuller's provocative beginning to The Naked Kiss is austere as Dreyer or Ozu in comparison with the frenzy with which Spielberg begins his movie.  I urge you to see Disclosure Day if only for a demonstration of what kinetic movie-making can look like.  

Edmond

 In Edmond (2005), William H. Macy, playing the title role, begins as a lonely, disaffected lawyer who leaves his wife on a whim and, eighty minutes later, has become the contented spouse of a large black inmate in a penitentiary.  Do I need to say anything more?  I assume you are now sold on this movie and will seek it out.  (It's on Amazon Prime.) The picture is based on a 1982 play by David Mamet and written by him for the screen; Edmond is directed by Stuart Gordon, the Chicago filmmaker most famous for this horror picture Reanimator based on H. P. Lovecraft's "Herbert West, Reanimator" -- Gordon who died in 2020 specialized in horror films.  'Nuff said -- I'm sure you are, even now, looking for a way to watch this movie:  William Macy! Stuart Gordon! David Mamet!  What more could a boy want?

Mid-life crises are troubling and dangerous.  Acting out on his mid-life crisis, Edmond experiences the night from Hell.  We first meet the buttoned-up lawyer (or accountant) arguing with his beautiful wife about a lamp broken by a cleaning lady.  Macy is married to a woman played by Rebecca Pigeon (Mamet's real-life wife) and Gordon stages the scene with the protagonist's wife half naked to display everything that Edmond inexplicably rejects.  Declaring that his life is meaningless and that he no longer loves her, Edmond is thrown out of their upscale condominium and embarks on a series of misadventures that end up with his arrest, his conviction and imprisonment, leading to his apparently happy relationship with his hulking cell-mate.  Edmond's malaise is diagnostic of a broader problem -- he is enraged by alleged injustices perpetrated against him and has collected grievances to the extent that he somehow perceives himself as a socio-cultural victim, when, in fact, objectively, he is an upper- middle-class White professional, more aligned with the oppressors than the oppressed.  Edmond's passion, as it were, begins with a stop at the local watering hole.  There he meets a stranger, an eerie demonic figure played by Joe Mantegna.  (Mantegna is the embodiment of White male rage.)  Mantegna is watching a basketball game and, enjoying his drink as he nonchalantly, observes that the Blacks (he uses a different word) have all the advantages -- the burden of responsibility in the world is borne by white men like Edmond while the African-Americans are irresponsible and, therefore, free to enjoy themselves as they wish.  Mantegna tips Edmond off as to an upscale strip club, gives him the address, and, even, hands our hero some "walking around money" encouraging him to act on his impulses with the jaunty remark:  "You'd do the same for me."  It's a very bad idea for Edmond to act on his impulses.  He goes to the strip club and ends up bargaining with the girls, trying to low-ball them on their offers for sexual services.  Edmond's obsession is less erotic than the generalized anxiety that people are trying to take advantage of him, these people being shady women and, even, more shady Black hustlers.  Ejected from the gentleman's club, Edmond goes to a peep show, the sort of place where you talk to the naked lady by phone as she presents herself for your delectation on the other side of glass wall.  Once again, the skinflint Edmond gets into a hassle over money -- he negotiates with the girl until she loses interest (in her business, time is money) and, again, Edmond is out on the street.  Edmond, then, goes to an expensive "athletic club", really a front for a massage parlor and sauna, where again he's so concerned about getting a bad deal on the sex that he is trying to buy that he finds himself ejected again.  He ventures some money on a game of three-card monte on a street corner in this hellish neighborhood -- it is nothing but sex shops, porno places and peep shows.  Predictably losing his money, Edmond gets mugged as well and the rest of his dough is stolen as is his wallet and credit cards.  Now, Edmond is truly down and out and he can't even afford the $22 charge at a noisome flop-house where he tries to spend the night.  He wanders down the street to a pawn shop and pawns his rolex watch or something of that nature.  With some of the proceeds, he buys a World War One bayonet, again very bad idea.  A pimp with dreadlocks in a clownish plaid suit lures Edmond into an alleyway, promising him an encounter with a prostitute.  The pimp threatens Edmond but before he can be mugged for a second time, our hero uses the bayonet to kill the man.  Edmond goes into an all-night cafe and, now, feels vindicated - his prerogatives as a proud White male have been affirmed and he's satisfied that he's a conqueror and a hero.  Glorying in his new found self-esteem, Edmond makes a vulgar suggestion to a waitress who, apparently, is impressed by his self-confidence and takes him home.  After having sex with her, Edmond embarks on Nietzschian harangue about Black people and homosexuals.  The girl agrees with him that homosexuals are bad news because they hate women.  The girl is an aspiring actress.  Edmond tells her that her aspirations will come to nothing and that she must proudly affirm that she is nothing more than a waitress.  This insults the girl and she tells Edmond that he is frightening her with his manic aggressiveness.  She has good reason to be frightened.  Edmond cuts her to pieces with his bayonet, a scene that gives Stuart Gordon, the old horror director, an opportunity to paint the walls and floor red with buckets of blood.  Edmond, who feels no remorse for his two murders, takes a subway or el train on which he insults a church-lady.  He, then, wanders around until he finds a church where a street preacher is ranting about hell-fire and damnation.  A cop appears with the church-lady in tow and Edmond is arrested.  He's humiliated in prison where he is paraded naked through the cell-block.  Locked in his cell, his cell-mate, a large black convict (who looks remarkably like Dave Chapelle) promptly sodomizes him. Edmond complains to the prison chaplain who says he's sorry about the sodomy but it's a prison, what can you do?  A year later, we see Edmond happily discusses metaphysics with his cell-mate with whom he now enjoys domestic bliss.  The men talk about heaven and hell and superintelligent dogs.  Then, it's lights out and the angry White man, now at peace, cuddles up in domestic bliss with his boyfriend.  

I liked this movie.  (Ther's a completely disposable Tarot card prophecy scene that's best disregarded as a mistake by the filmmakers.)  The picture is blunt, offensive, and short.  Everything you want to know about White rage and how privileged White men imagine themselves to be victims is on offer in this picture.  Mamet's characteristically clipped and terse dialogue works well.  The movie is single-minded but entertaining and, I suppose, makes an important social and cultural point.  Gordon's bargain basement horror movie mise-en-scene is constantly compelling, stark, and frightening.  If you don't like this well-crafted picture, you don't like its message and theme.  And, I think, this is a valid response to a movie so vehemently outspoken as this film.  

The Damned

 The Damned (1969) is the first picture in what has been called Luchino Visconti's "German Trilogy" -- the other pictures in the group are Death in Venice and Ludwig (about the mad King of Bavaria).  Critics say that with The Damned, Visconti liberated his cinema from the constraints of 1950's morality and, in keeping with the "swinging sixties" and "the summer of love", produced a film explicitly depicting various kinds of sexual debauchery.  This sounds fun, but Visconti seems to have been a "self-loathing" homosexual and the movie is a hysterial screed against perversion.  This is part of The Damned's problem -- we can see what Visconti is repelled by, and the forms of perversion that he deplores, but it's not clear that he has any sort of sexual behavior to propose as antithetical to the dead-end erotic insanity that the film displays.  To use modern jargon, there is no sex-positive element to the movie at all -- all eros is either perverse or fatal, a theme that Visconti will pursue in his Thomas Mann adaptation of Death in Venice made afterthis film.  The Damned is beautiful to behold, with lavish sets and stunning costumes.  It is also claustrophobic with the aspect of a being a very freely filmed stage play -- three-quarters of the movie take place in the vast, seemingly endless, corridors, dining rooms, and bed-chambers of the mansion of the Essenbeck family, a depraved tribe that makes iron for German armaments.  (The Essenbecks are self-evidently modeled on the Krupp family of German ordinance manufacturers.)  As in The Leopard, probably Visconti's masterpiece from this period (it was released in 1960), the director uses a series of banquets and celebrations to drive his complex narrative.  (This technique was adapted by Coppola in his Godfather movies which are very obviously influenced by Visconti's Leopard and, to some extent, The Damned.)  The film's lavish furnishings, including its gorgeous actors, are filmed by a camera that moves around the action, gliding among the players in a mise-en-scene into which big close-ups are interpolate with languorous tracking shots..  The film uses many close-ups as punctuation and the camera is generally positioned to bring all of the spectacular interior scenery into focus.  There are a number of showy zooms to emphasize aspects of the tableaux that Visconti films.  Light is used expressionistically -- the movie looks like a picture by Douglas Sirk (or Fassbinder) with characters who are doomed or gradually succumbing to madness often stepping into strange pools of green or bluish light.  The photography isn't chiaroscuro as in film noir -- some sequences are shot in near darkness but shadows don't play an important part in the picture.  Rather, Visconti uses odd, unrealistic and unmotivated bursts of color to signify the emotional chaos that he shows on screen.  Exterior shots, of which there are only a few, features beautiful twilights over mountain lakes and shaggy ranges of peaks, "golden hour" footage, and drab, grim city streets.  A funeral in which the workers and management of the Gusseisen Fabrik (Iron-pour factory) parade through the foundry is shot at dusk, with the figures moving against scaffold-shaped arrays of iron pipes and towering blast furnaces in the gloom of what seems to be either pre-dawn or post-sunset -- an entirely surreal milieu for a funeral of this sort.  The movie is bookended by huge displays of pyrotechnics with iron being poured from furnaces in clouds of smoke and glittering sparks flung upward into the air.  Despite the beauty of the camerawork, the lavish sets and set decorations, and the lurid depravity on offer, the film seems grave, stately, an epic in the style of David Lean's more inert spectacles -- it's almost 3 hours long, difficult to follow, and moves like a funeral procession itself, a somber parade of beautiful images that marches slowly across the screen to its foregone conclusion.

The movie's plot is similar to the HBO show Succession but with pronounced Nazi inflections.  A powerful and immensely wealthy industrialist Joachim Essenbeck has called his successors and heirs together, with their wives, to discuss the crisis in German politics.  Essenbeck, who loathes the vulgar National Socialists, realizes that to survive his family must negotiate some sort arrangement with the Nazis.  It's a deal with the devil but one to which Joachim knows he must accede.  There are a bunch of people involved in this initial introductory dinner party on the occasion of Joachim's birthday:  everyone is related one way or the other, and, frankly speaking, I had trouble figuring out exactly how the characters were connected to one another.  It suffices to say that one of guests is a brown-shirted SA man who represents the Hitler regime.  An in-law Herbert is vehemently anti-Nazi together with his wife Elizabeth.  Joachim is married to a much younger woman named Sophie (Ingrid Thulin).  She is carrying on a love affair with Friedrich, an opportunist and social climber.  Friedrich is receiving counsel from a sinister Aryan mannequin named Aschenbach.  There are various sons and cousins around, nephews and nieces including one guy who plays cello, some little girls who recite a birthday poem for their grandfather, and Sophie's son with Joachim, Martin (Helmut Berger).  The highlight of the film's opening scenes and its most famous sequence comes in the first fifteen minutes.  The dinner party has adjourned to a salon where there is a curtained stage on which the cousins and nephews can perform for the dinner guests.  One son plays cello to the mild approbation of the old man.  Then, some guys haul in a spotlight.  When the curtain parts, we see a woman dressed in music-hall brothel attire-- garter belts over her plump white thighs, a corset, and a man's hat; the woman sings a bawdy song as performed by Marlene Dietrich in Der Blau Engel.  News arrives by messenger that the Reichstag is on fire.  The song is cut short and a zoom reveals that the Dietrich impersonator is Martin, Sophie and Joachim's youngest son.  He yanks off his wig to reveal his short haircut.  Needless to say, Dad looks a bit appalled and embarrassed but Sophie is thrilled at her lad's artistry.  The party, then, return to the dining room where it is agreed that the family will have to make some accommodations to the despised Nazi party.  Martin, citing Dietrich's song, says that they need:  "Ein Mann, ein richtiger Mann -- that is "A man, a real man."  (Dietrich sent a note to Helmut Berger telling him that he sang the song better than she had in The Blue Angel -- he was more like Marlene Dietrich than Dietrich herself.)  The family decides that they will have to appoint someone who can work with Nazis on munitions manufacture.  After the dinner party and news of the Reichstag fire, Sophie (who is married to Joachim) plots with her lover, Friedrich for him to seize control of the business. Sophie is simultaneously like Lady Macbeth and, then, Gertrude in Hamlet. And, thereafter, Joachim is gunned down in his bed, the chess-game for corporate succession suddenly turning violent.  The gentle anti-Fascist Herbert has to flee with the SS on his heels.  His wife, Elizabeth, played by Charlotte Rampling, helps him leap out of the window when the Nazis invade the home.  Martin, now, has become Hamlet, now sure what to do in light of his mother's complicity in the death of his father.  

The film now tracks Martin's adventures.  He is a pedophile, has been grooming a little Jewish girl, and, apparently, having sex with her.  He seems to have infected her with a venereal disease and she hangs herself.  Since the child is "a little Jewess", Martin's crimes against her aren't even acknowledged judicially as crimes although the scion of the company's behavior is generally thought deplorable -- primarily because of his intercourse with a Jew.  (The child's mother is missing; Martin has a prostitute girlfriend but her part is under written and it's not clear what she knows about her lover's sexual proclivities.)  Not content with his escapades as a child molester, Martin ends up having sex with his increasingly unstable and hysterical mother.  By this point, Martin has secured an appointment to the directorship of the family company and agrees to wholeheartedly endorse the Nazis in exchange for munition's contracts.  Poor Herman returns from exile; his wife has been murdered in a concentration camp although it seems that his children are still alive.  He confronts his family at another feast and admits that he has given up his resistance to the family being assimilated by the National Socialists.  He invites the Nazis to arrest him and, then, vanishes from the movie.  Friedrich is now engaged to be married to Martin's mother, Sophie.  Her incestuous encounter with Martin has rendered her comatose and she is kept under sedation by injections of morphine or some other equally pernicious narcotic.  Friedrich's scheme to marry Sophie and assume control the Essenbeck factories and foundries is, now, a meaningless exercise.  Martin has consolidated his alliance with the Nazis after the extermination of the S.A. storm troopers in the "night of the long knives" and Friedrich's marriage to Sophie is a macabre comedy that comes too late to restore the groom's fortunes.  Sophie is now a zombie, a staggering corpse with a waxen pale face and no affect at all.  The marriage takes place in the mansion in a salon where a group of drunken couples are sullenly canoodling while on the radio an early thirties American crooner croons -- now and then, a zombie couple rises to shuffle around in a semblance of ballroom dancing.  After the marriage, Martin marches the happy couple into a nearby room and gives them some vials of poison -- he doesn't even need to provide instructions to the bride and groom.  Returning to the room a few minutes later, husband and wife are both dead, eyes open and dead faces fixed in grimaces; the bride tilted upward with a stiff neck staring into nothingness.  Martin's black Nazi uniform is splendid; he has replaced his drag regalia with a drag costume of another kind.  The movie ends with a montage of hellish flames roaring up out of the foundry furnaces.  

The movie's centerpiece is the massacre of the SA men by the Gestapo.  This slaughter takes place in a Bavarian town with lots of polka music, bare-assed troopers swimming in the icy glacial lake, and enormous quantities of beer swilled down by Roehm's SA men.  In Visconti's lurid imagination, the SA gathering at the Bavarian resort is a homosexual orgy of the most debauched and flagrant kind.  A chorus-line of cross-dressing troopers in lingerie perform for crowds of SA officers who have divested themselves of most of their uniforms, maintaining their boots, perhaps, and a few scraps of their Nazi regalia for an additional kinky frisson.  The boys all march off to bed, staggering drunk, as frisky couples and threesomes.  Comes the dawn, and with it, the Black Shirts with machine guns and jack boots; they make quick work of the SA lads who are gunned down in their beds or herded into the town square to be riddled with bullets as the sun is rising.  The entire sequence is pure fantasy and adopts, I understand, certain calumnies about the SA (and the Nazis also) that were invented by the Communists -- the Fascists, the Leftists alleged, are just a bunch of queens and fairies.  It's baffling that Visconti adopts this imagery for his luridly anti-Fascist film, particularly when one considers that Visconti was engaged in a sexual affair with his leading man, Helmut Berger who plays Martin.  Visconti isn't good at violence and the massacre is perfunctory -- he's more interested in the spectacle of uniform and costume (as worn by his ultra-well-dressed women) and the protocols of High Society.  His sense of spectacle is fundamentally humane -- the massacre is staged in an abstract manner that seems oddly unrealistic:  he's much more interested in dinner parties and family confrontations that look like they could be part of a filmed version of Mann's Buddenbrooks, a novel that Visconti seems to have been influenced by.  Italian fascism in inextricably linked with sexual perversion in the Leftist imagination for some reason that is inexplicable to me:  this theme runs through Bertolucci's The Conformist and 1900 and, of course, reaches its apogee (some would say nadir) in Pasolini's Salo or the Thousand Days of Sodom.   

Birds of Passage

 Birds of Passage (2018) is an ambitious crime film set in Columbia between about 1969 and 1980.  The film's narrative traces the rise of the Waayu people, an indigenous desert-dwelling tribe, from an impoverished nomadic people into something approaching modernity and, then, their fall as well.  This all occurs within the span of about a decade, the Waayu's meteoric rise and fall jet-fueled by their increasingly fatal involvement in "selling weed" -- bales of industrial strength weed, cultivated from San Marcos seeds obligingly supplied by Peace Corps volunteers.  An enterprise that begins with burros ends with late model SUVs and battles fought with machine-guns and rocket-launchers.  The movie has an intriguing premise, but it has complex plot and some of it wasn't clear to me.  Nonetheless, this film directed by the Columbian filmmaker Cirro Guerra and his wife, Christina Gallego (she seems to have the contacts with the indigenous people), has compelling characters and a gritty, raw texture -- at times, the film is "magic realism" of a sort that would seem contrived if it wasn't so ethnographically motivated by the visions and customs of the Waaju.

At first, viewers may think that they have stumbled into a film nicely shot and edited for a college anthropology class.  A young woman, Zaida, has been in isolation in a hut made of branches and wattle for a year.  We don't why but she is commended by her formidable grandmother, Ursula, for her patience and fortitude. (The Waaju are apparently matrililneal, with matriarchs establishing the traditions by which the tribal people regulate their lives; the film is like The Godfather if all the "men of honor" weren't elderly Sicilians but old Indian women.)  Zaida dances with potential suitors, wearing a bright kimono-like garment with winged sleeves.  The dance seems to imitate the mating rituals of birds -- the bride struts in her plumage and the male darts backward as she advances toward him.  At first, Zaida dances with a boy called Leonidas.  Although we don't understand this until much later, Leonidas is the male heir of one of the leading matrilineal lines and his grandmother wants him to be the war chief, or male leader, of tribe.  Leonidas is just a kid and he embarrasses himself by falling over backward as the bride chases him.  Another man, an older youth called "Rapayet", dances with her -- she can't cow him and he announces that he will make her "his woman."  This sets up a fundamental conflict in the tribe between Rapayet who aspires to leadership and the ostensible heir to power, the ineffectual Leonidas.  

Rapayet has to acquire a prohibitively expensive dowry to marry Zaida.  (The dowry seems to have been designed to deter him from the match.)  Rapayet, who is not to be deterred, goes into the mountains with his best buddy Moises, an Aljuna (someone not in the tribe), a half-black hoodlum with ties to the drug trade. Moises, who is a shady guy, has a Landrover and he is smuggling contraband coffee.  Rapayet buys up Moises' coffee and the two of them negotiate with Anibal, an Uncle who lives in a Western-style house in the hills.  Anibal is a dope farmer.  Trading the coffee for marijuana, Rapayet sells the weed to American Peace Corps volunteers, seen sybaritically frolicking half-nude on a beach.  He raises enough money for the dowry, paid in goats and cows, and is allowed to marry Zaida.  A series of evil omens presage trouble:  there's a huge green locust that appears creeping through the desert gravel and sand  and a longlegged crane of some kind (we see only its insect-like and unearthly feet as it stalks through the sleeping quarters.). Rapayet and Moises eliminate some middle-men and begin trading with Americans who transport the weed on small airplanes.  There's s double-cross and Moises, who is a hotheaded thug, shoots a couple of Americans.  They dig huge holes and bury the dead men in their planes.  A third plane is allowed to depart to send warning that the Columbian Waayu mobsters are not to be trifled-with.  The Americans, apparently with Moises' connivance, retaliate by killing some Waayu.  As we have expected for a good fifteen minutes, Rapayet must take revenge on the man who was his best friend.   Rapayet goes to Moises' village where the Narcos are partying -- Moises' gang of crooks all speak Spanish and not Waayu.  Rapayet finds Moises having sex and guns him down

The movie is divided into cantos and the saga is represented as being sung by a lone Waayu shepherd tending his herd of goats in the barren desert badlands.  Each canto represents a shift in time.  In the next canto, Rapayet lives with Zaida, his son, and his daughter, Indira in a Hollywood-style modernist house incongruously set in the middle of the empty desert.  The old women are having nightmares that prophecy doom.  Rapayet and most of the desert tribe go to a "second wake" at his uncle Anibal's place in the hills.  The "second wake" is a ritual in which the casket of a dead leader is opened and the bones, ragged with strips of rotting flesh, are lovingly washed anointed with liquor spat out by one of the old women with magical powers, the, disarticulated skeleton, then,, bundled in white linen to be buried again.  This custom isn't viewed as morbid by the tribe and, in fact, is an occasion for a lavish party at Anibal's place, a nice hacienda now equipped with a swimming pool. (This lengthy and ornate scene is the equivalent of the wedding in The Godfather which, in turn, derives from a similar scene in Visconti's The Leopard) The old women are conducting some sort of puberty ritual with regard to Anibal's nubile daughter.  The men all get drunk and there's a horse-race that Leonidas, who can't do anything right, loses to Rapayet's son.  Leonidas who is now a teenager offers to marry Anibal's daughter but he is rejected.  In a rage, Leonidas humiliates one of Anibal's bodyguards by paying the man to publicly eat dog shit.  (He funds the exhibition with a big bundle of cash he was going to use for his dowry payment.)  This leads to a big quarrel that the elderly women are unable to mediate.  Leonidas gets drunk again and returns to Anibal's hacienda where he rapes the man's daughter (and, possibly, kills her).  Anibal sends his men out to ambush a group of Waayu drug mules and slaughters them.  Anibal's dope fields have been burned and he has lost many of his men. A "speaker" or mediator is sent with a talking stick to try to buy-off the feud but Anibal, who is a furious rage, shoots the man violating the rules of the tribe.  (On Rapayet's side, there are simiilar breaches of ritual protocol -- Rapayet and his henchmen are storing weapons in caskets in their graveyard supposed to be full of corpses awaiting their "second wake." Anibal sells the last of his marijuana in Medillin and uses the money to recruit some mercenaries.  They attack Rapayet's lavish modernist home and blow it up with grenade-launchers.  Apparently, Zaida and Rapayet's son are killed.  Anibal all alone now, and leading a burro, representing the last of his wealth, comes to Rapayet's ruined compound and kills Rapayet.  Indira, Rapayet's daughter, wanders off herding a couple of goats -- the nomadic tribe has returned to poverty and shepherd's work after their decade-long and disastrous foray into drug-dealing.  The shepherd singing the last canto says that he made the song because he had met a young woman herding a few goats in the desert and observed that no one had taught her the shepherd's trade -- she didn't seem to know what she was doing.  (He is referring to Indira.)

Birds of Passage runs 125 minutes but because of the abundance of action packed into the picture, seems to be a longer film. My summary is probably inexact and inaccurate.  Parts of the movie are hard to follow and it's difficult to determine who, if anyone, has any agency in the plot.  Rapayet seems rather passive and is acted upon as opposed to acting.  The old women, rival grandmothers, apparently are controlling the action, although, obviously, things spiral into chaos.  Notwithstanding the rather Shakespearian level of violence, the killings mostly take place off-screen and are depicted only by their outcomes.  The movie doesn't dwell on violence but shows it in a matter-of-fact way.  The Waayu are fiercely proud and have never been subdued by outsiders.  But they are prone to internecine blood feuds.  Rapayet is named after a forebear who was the sole survivor of a feud.  In the end of the movie, the film's Homer, the shepherd seen in profile against a setting sun, sings mournfully that their gods no longer speak to the Waayu through dreams as was once the case.  It's not outsiders (the despised aljunos) that destroy the Waayu but their own rivalries and inter-clan feuding -- all driven to a fever-pitch by the easy money involved in the drug trade.  The picture is elegantly made and extremely interesting.  The subject matter is exotic to the point that I wasn't able to identify with the characters, but I am able to see that the picture is epic in scope and recommend it.  But it's hard to follow:  at one point, one of the formidable grandmothers goes to Anibal's compound to retrieve a corpse wrapped with a white sheet -- this is clearly a key scene, but I didn't whose body was in the tightly wrapped bundle.  (I think this confusion was intended, but I'm not sure why -- from reading plot summary, I now know the wrapped corpse was that of Rapayet's son.)  I wasn't able to reliably distinguish between the grandmothers in their colorful batik gowns and this may have led to my confusion as to this scene.  Although there's a lot of exuberant gangster movie stuff in the movie, the things that will stick with you, I think, are the opening scenes involving the dance imitating birds and, then, the "second wake" at Anibal's hacienda -- although the tropes of a gangster film are obviously employed in the picture (particularly in the assassination of  Moises' episode), the movie suggests something strange and incommunicable on the basis of its ethnographic detail.  This picture is far better than Cirro Guerra''s 2015 Embrace of the Serpent, a highly acclaimed movie but one that I thought was overwrought and simplistic.  Guerra was hired by Amazon to produce a mini-series with an all-star cast called Cortes about the fall of the Aztec empire.  Covid intervened and the film was never made.  Guerra's Tv series Green Frontier (2017) was beautifully shot but impenetrable to me -- it was another movie about indigenous people living, this time, in the Columbian jungle.  Guerra doesn't seem to have made a film since 2019 when he released Waiting for the Barbarians, a movie with a distinguished cast that was poorly received.