Wild Horse Nine

Despite being marketed as a whacky buddy comedy, Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine (2026) is pretty strong stuff.  John Malkovitch, playing a world-weary CIA spook, tells a young woman how to resist fascism.  He says that she should kill every police officer that she meets, kill every military man and soldier, and kill every government official infected with fascism.  He is speaking with complete seriousness.  He, then, tells her that if she knows any five-year olds who want to serve their country and grow up to be police or military men, "you should kill them as a child." The director, McDonagh is an Irishman with sympathy for the IRA and some of the extremism and ferocity of Belfast politics vibrates in his murderous script.  (The protagonists of the movie encounter some British tourists on Easter Island, or Rapa Nui as it is called by "the indigenous" -- much to the scorn of the CIA assassins -- and, of course, the picture doesn't let these innocuous Brits off the hook without a thorough drubbing.)  Wild Horse Nine is uncompromising, wonderfully acted by Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as the CIA agents, Chris and Lee and mostly highly entertaining -- it's too long and there's too much malarkey in the dialogue; McDonagh can write glittering and bitter colloquies between his two principals and, frankly speaking, there is too much of this stuff in the movie.  Nonetheless, the picture has a very powerful ending, sufficiently gripping for the viewer to forgive some of the tedium in a picture that I reckon is 15 minutes too long and too self-indulgent.

I can't detail much of the plot without giving away the picture's ingenious plot twists and turns.  Parts of the movie are very bold and surprising, but these effects will be softened (and, therefore, less efficacious) if I reveal these details.  The premise is that two CIA agents, the old and sick Chris, and his younger sidekick, Lee, have traveled on vacation to Easter Island.  The trip is supposed to be for rest and relaxation but Malkovich's character is like Camille -- that is, dying of some sort of mortal illness that leaves you, more or less, fully intact and capable up to the final hour.  Chris spits out some blood, stains some of  his handkerchiefs, but, is able to navigate the rigors of the trip pretty well -- he's said to be 72.  (He also appears to have early onset Alzheimers and is very forgetful; he carries notes in his pockets reminding him of things -- but this aspect of the picture isn't much developed and is more of a plot nuisance than anything else.)  Chris' sidekick, Lee, is under the orders of the CIA boss in Santiago  to murder the older man.  Chris seems to know and accept this and, in fact, wants to be shot in the head by Lee, a fellow agent whom he respects, at least, a little bit.  Because Chris is a pious Catholic, he isn't willing to commit suicide.  In fact, he muses about death for much of the picture in a witty, hypertheatrical way, (post-modern variants on "To be or not to be") pondering whether dinosaurs go to heaven and whether there is an afterlife for cancerous tumors who have diligently done their job killing their hosts.  (McDonough, who is a renowned playwright, fills the picture with striking and memorable speeches, in fact, too much of this sort of material. )Chris is dictating his memoirs and his autobiolgraphy includes many unflattering accounts of CIA coups and massacres -- in fact, at the Santiago agency there is concern on the part of MJ (Steve Buscemi), Chris and Lee's boss, that the dying man will seriously compromise the agency by revealing details about some celebrated assassinations.  In fact, Chris is carrying a souvenir of a famous killing in his luggage brought to Easter Island.  In general, Chris is a liability for the CIA; he can't keep his mouth shut.  In the airport in Santiago, the two spooks meet a couple of girls, ostensibly students, also traveling to Rapa Nui.  Chris blithely tells them that he and his partner are CIA agents sent to Chile to "destabilize your democracy."  The story takes place in the summer of 1973 and Chris tells the girls that the CIA will murder their Marxist President, whom they support and adore, in September of that year, crackdown on people just like them, and torture thousands to death.  The girls are appalled but they laugh off the intelligence.  On the island, Chris and Lee bicker like an old married couple.  Chris is injecting himself with morphine to deaden his pain.  He tells Lee that he has killed 68 people and that he liked Patrice Lumumba, for instance, until he helped to kill the Congolese President. The men tour the island in a little yellow car and look at the famous "big heads" as they call them.  (The movie provides beautiful vistas of Easter Island that, not surprisingly, looks a lot like the more wild parts of Ireland.)  Lee is quarreling with his promiscuous wife (played by a steely Parker Posey) and he seems to be planning to divorce her -- she taunts Lee over the telephone with word of a new one-night stand.  Chris goes out to see the "Big Heads" in the moonlight, slugging down gulps of whiskey, and is comforted by a friendly wild horse (there are herds of wild horses on Rapa Nui) that gently nuzzles him.  While viewing the Moai (the "big heads"), Chris discovers that someone is watching him and, in fact, taking pictures as he lolls drunkenly on the grass near the big shadowy figures.  Chris starts shooting at the car which speeds away and the story, then, takes an even darker and more sinister turn.

This is a wonderful movie with many surprising twists that are the best kind of revelation -- the twists will feel inevitable to you in retrospect but were generally impossible (at least, for me) to predict.  The movie has great songs from the early seventies and is much better than its advertising -- it has genuine soul. 

Force of Evil

 The reception of films on their release is something of a riddle:  Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil was largely disregarded when it hit the screens in 1948.  Those critics who reviewed the movie, with a few exceptions, considered the picture to be a standard, low-budget crime film, well-made but mediocre.  This is puzzling because Force of Evil is now regarded as a landmark in American cinema and, perhaps, the best (or one of the best) film noir.  But, of course, in 1948, there was no film noir genre, a style of movie-making with existentialist overtones, known to film reviewers.  (The French discovered the genre hiding in plain sight among cheap American crime pictures -- but this was later, in the sixties.)  Accordingly, it's possible that Force of Evil's idiosyncrasies couldn't be assimilated to the standard categories of pictures (musical, western, comedy, crime movie) expected by audiences and reviewers.  Furthermore, Force of Evil at a 79 taut minutes has a complex, exceptionally byzantine plot -- if you blink twice or go out for popcorn, you will have missed key narrative points.  The film is written in a highly poetic and theatrical diction -- a British critic is said to have shouted out during a screening that "this thing is in blank verse!"  Force of Evil was intended as the lower bill picture on a double feature, (the B-side on a hit single) probably paired with some splashy technicolor romance or comedy with A-list stars.  Lots of critics likely just skipped the first feature in favor of attending the big budget picture.  Those who did see the movie may have been confused by its exceptionally intricate plot and elaborate rhetoric and, in any event, anticipating the main feature, were in no mood to devote much mental energy to this picture.  But Force of Evil, almost lost (Scorsese introduces the picture by saying that it was saved "by accident") is now regarded as a masterpiece.  In a nicely restored version, the picture (mostly half invisible when shown on TV) deserves its reputation and, indeed, exceeds expectations.

Some of the narrative confusion in Force of Evil is intentional.  During the first few minutes, a narrator describes the activity of "banks" -- there is no reason for the viewer to not consider these banks to be lending institutions of the sort often shown in movies, for instance, the bank and bankers in It's a Wonderful Life.  But, in fact, these "banks" are illegal gambling enterprises that collect bets on four digit numbers, "bank" the cash, and, then, make pay-outs to winners. The film insists upon a confusion between legitimate business and illicit racketeer-influenced enterprise -- Polansky had been a card-carrying Communist and he intends that viewers understand that banking is a racket, whether legally condoned or illegal -- furthermore, Polonsky insists that the organs of the State are instrumental in suppressing competition and fostering monopoly interests; the "banks" are engaged in cut-throat competition and disadvantage one another by calling in tips that lead to police raids on adversary businesses.  The police, it seems, are the main force for violence in the industry although the criminals will, now and then, shoot it out with one another or assassinate rivals.  This perverse industry is predatory:  we see that most of the bets are literally nickel and dime, gambling by pauperized proles who can't afford to be wasting their money in this way.  The suckers are motivated by patriotism -- at the outset of the movie, the poor folks placing bets want to buy a chance on "1776" because it is the eve of the Fourth of July.  Organized crime is just business conducted by another means.  The criminals operate in corporate-style syndicates that buy-up or exterminate competition, that expand mercilessly, and that are represented by expensive corporate-style lawyers.  The system is totalizing -- the film's claustrophobic ambience suggests a closed-loop:  everyone is either corrupt or being corrupted.  There are no innocents anywhere in the film:  greed motivates the punters, avarice drives the bosses and gangsters, and, even, the nice girl heroine is avid to be corrupted by the crooked Joe Morse, the lawyer for the criminal racket.  

Joe Morse's brother, Leo is fifty with no prospects and a bad ticker; he runs a small-scale "bank" and has done this for twenty years.  He's a little fish in a tank full of sharks.  A mobster named Tucker has rigged the number for selection on July 4 to be "1776".  Since everyone is putting money down on that number, this pick will bankrupt all the "banks" -- they won't be able to cover the bets placed at 100 to 1 odds.  This will force the "banks" to borrow money from Tucker who will, then, consolidate the enterprises under his control and force the little operations out of business.  Joe Morse is trying to protect his brother Leo and has arranged with Tucker that Leo will be appointed head "banker" by the syndicate.  The scheme is successful, but there is a problem:  Leo and his crew of crooks, who represent a better, less ruthless, grade of criminals don't want to be bought out by the vicious Tucker.  Police raids are called in on Leo's enterprise and his loyal employees, including his long-time secretary, Doris, end up arrested and tossed in jail.  This is a warning.  Tucker sends Joe down to spring Leo's workers, including his skittish and fearful accountant and Doris -- they have to pay a fine, subsidized by Tucker and Joe Morse.  In the taxi ride to Doris' house, Joe stops for a second to buy roses for the attractive young woman and courts her, although he warns Doris that there is something "black" about him. Leo continues to resist Tucker and so there's another raid called in on Leo's "bank".  Meanwhile a rival gang run by a killer named Fico are trying to horn in on Tucker's monopoly over the number's racket.  And, all of this occurs in the context of the State planning to appropriate the numbers racket for its own profit -- the State intends to sponsor a legal lottery which is just another numbers enterprise.  This complex situation leads to betrayals and murder in which the lawyer, Joe Morse is complicit.  Despite his efforts to protect his brother, Leo gets assassinated and dumped in a stony crevasse under the George Washington Bridge.  

This rococo plot is adorned with spectacular set pieces and brilliant chilling details.  The plot is tightly built like a steel combination lock.  Tucker has a serpentine moll who hangs out in a boudoir full of plaster-of-paris cherubs; she takes a shot at Joe Morse but the lawyer remains true to Doris, the good girl who is very rapidly becoming a bad girl.  When the plot to exploit 1776 as a number is revealed, the mentally defective enforcer and janitor at Leo's "bank" lets out a startling, bestial bray -- he's claustrophobic on account of crashing his taxi in the East River and being trapped underwater for a few minutes and he shrieks with panic every time the cops raid the "bank".  Leo's timid accountant is terrified by the cops and tries to escape by running up a narrow flight of stairs; when he encounters a burly cop with a nightstick, he screams and tries to vault over the policemen on the steps below him, a startling image. Later, the accountant is gunned down in a sleazy restaurant, falling to the floor with his eyeglasses broken like the student killed by the Cossacks on Eisenstein's Odessa Steps.  Polonsky has the sadism and flair for violence that we see in Fritz Lang -- if he had been allowed to make more movies, he might have been one of film's great master of violent action sequences.  There are tiny but telling moments:  when Morse lifts a phone receiver, he hears a slight click signifying that his phone is tapped.  The film cuts to an extreme close-up of Morse's panicked eyes.  Near the end of the movie, Joe Morse, who is now doomed by his involvement in the racket, goes to an after hours joint with his girlfriend, Doris.  He's drunk and, in the background, there's a Black jazz band playing in front of a strange painting on a wall that looks like a huge multifoliate rose, possibly referring to the roses with which Morse wooed Doris earlier in the movie.  Joe goes out on Wall Street before dawn; the streets are eerily deserted and, in a famous shot, he stands beneath a brooding figure of George Washington, a statue in front of the lower Manhattan Federal Reserve Bank -- this rhymes with the notion of the criminal "banks" and with the mobsters dropping Leo's body under the George Washington Bridge.  When Joe goes with Doris to retrieve Leo's corpse, the voice-over (Joe) says that he just went "down and down and down".  We see a tiny figure of Joe running down a long flight of steps in front of a massive stone wall -- it's as if he is descending into Hell.  Throughout, the dialogue is spoken very fast and rendered in what seems to be Shakespearian meter and diction.  The speech is so fast and intricate that it's often hard to understand -- as with Shakespeare, you have to listen with every fiber of your being.

After directing this film, Polonsky was blacklisted until 1969 when he was allowed to direct again, a curiosity Western with Robert Redford and Kathleen Turner called Tell them Willie Boy is here.  The movie was a success d'estime but probably not watchable today because of its use of White actors playing roles of oppressed Indians.  I think Polonsky may have made another film, a quasi-Western about Cossacks in Russia -- after that, he went silent and died shortly thereafter.  Polonsky's mangled career is one of the great tragedies in American film history.  Who knows what he would have done if he hadn't been silenced for 21 years?  That said, on the basis of Force of Evil, it's reasonable to think that Polonsky would have been corrupted by the system and Hollywood's big money like everyone else.  It's the nature of things. 

Body and Soul

 Body and Soul is a boxing movie that is the template for later films in this genre including Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull.  James Wong Howe's camerawork establishes the paradigm for filming the mixture of frenzy and choreographic art that characterizes prize-fighting.  He puts the camera right in the ring and the fighters land their lefts and rights on the audience's nose.  Boxers sweat gallons and gush blood from their brows and cheeks and lips.  In Howe's black and white, the fights have a documentary style fury, but are punctuated by big close-ups and aerial shots of the action.  Clearly, Howe's camerawork was influential on Scorsese and the gory fight scenes in Raging Bull merely heighten and stylize the ferocious action in Body and Soul.  The movie's plot is sentimental, harkening back to silent films in its use of archetypal caricatures (the long-suffering and noble mother, the virginal good girl versus the seductive harlot, the champ and the gangster) and the film's melodramatic conflicts are simplified into parables -- but this retro material, a throw-back to an earlier style of movie-making is yanked into the post-war era by the picture's ultra-cynical script and hardboiled film noir dialogue.  Sport is essentially a kind of drama with highly abstract and simplified contours:  someone must win and someone must lose and the progression of time and violent injury intrinsic to any sport (most particularly boxing), in the end, converts every champ into a loser.  As they say if the ending is happy, it's not the ending -- and this is manifest in the apparently "happy ending" in Body and Soul which last exactly 10 seconds before a title warns us that this is the end.  

Characteristic of post-war noir, the film begins in media res and has an elaborate flashback structure.  The Champ, Charley Davis, (John Garfield in one of his signature roles) is suffering night terrors.  He calls out the name of a man, Ben, who is apparently dead.  Sweat beads the Champ's brow.  He's out in the country where he has been training for a big fight against an up-and-comer who is challenging him for the championship.  The Champ is in the clutches of a silky, ice-cold gangster named Roberts who has demanded that he take a fall to deliver on insider bets that the mobster and his cronies have made.  The Champ is favored two-to-one in the bout and knows that he can defeat his young opponent.  But past compromises and moral lapses have put him in the hands of the unscrupulous mobster and his factotum, an oily fat man Quinn (played by William Conrad).  Before his hands are taped, the Champ lies back and falls asleep again in the dressing room.  And, then, he apparently dreams the flashback that comprises three-quarters of the movie.  

We see the Champ at a banquet or smoker of some kind put on by a smarmy wardheeler.  The politician has brought a beauty queen in a swimming suit to stand in front of a mob of gawking men, a rudimentary form of entertainment but, apparently, effective.  The Champ courts the beauty queen whose name is Peg (Lilli Palmer) -- she turns out to be a nice girl who is an aspiring artist.  She lives with a woman-sculptor who smokes with a decadent-looking cigarette holder and coldly appraises the Champ, admiring his physique and qualities as a potential sexual partner.  Charley has won an amateur boxing tourney and is being courted by some sketchy gamblers and crooks.  He has a true-blue friend, Shorty, who acts as his agent even though he's out of his depth with the corrupt and parasitic crooks who want to cash-in on the Champ's success.  The Champ goes to his father, a Jewish candy-shop owner (a type later exploited in West Side Story) and says he wants to be a prize-fighter.  Mom disapproves, but Dad opens his cash register and when Mom isn't looking slips Charley at ten to buy his boxing gear.  It's a bad neighborhood and, when gangster shoot up a speakeasy next door, they throw a bomb that destroys the candy shop and the kindly old Jewish owner as well.  Charley woos Peg, the nice girl, and brings her home to his steely, if virtuous mother -- mother, Anna, is played by a brilliant character actress, Anne Revere,  and her glacial mixture of virtue but loving concern for her son is fully the equal of the wickedness of the gangsters that entrap Charley.  The bad guys take over representing Charley although poor Shorty isn't aware that he's been cut out of the transaction -- Charley keeps paying him but half of his income goes to the crooked promoter and gangland cronies.  Peg becomes disenchanted with Charley's greed and his betrayal of the loyal Shorty and she tells the Champ that they can't get married until he straightens up -- but the Champ wants his reward for enduring the beatings that he takes in the ring:  he's a great fighter but like Jake LaMotta takes a lot punches.  For three or four years, the Champ courts the bad girl, his mistress, Alice who is a night-club chanteuse and a gold digger.  Poor Peg, apparently, remains true to her love for Charley, even though he's now walking on the wild side.

The gangsters set up a fight between Charley and Ben, a colored boxer who has a brain clot in his brain.  If he gets hit wrong, he runs the risk of dying.  Charley, who is unaware of his opponent's injury, bashes the hell out of Ben and, almost, kills him.  When Ben gets out of the hospital, Charley, who is a good guy notwithstanding the corrupting influence of his handlers, hires the Black fighter to be his trainer for the big match with the rising star.  (Ben is walleyed, one of his eyes looking out into space, apparently the result of his brain injury.)  Ben figures out that Charley is being groomed to take a fall and begs the Champ not to betray himself by fixing the outcome of the big championship fight.  Ben gets so exercised by his strong feelings that the Champ should fight the kid fair and square that he falls down, hits his head, and, then, scrambling to his feet flails around as if he's in a boxing match himself.  Then, he drops dead.  The Champ is paralyzed by grief but, when threatened by the bad guys, agrees to fight and throw the boxing match to the challenger.  This brings us to the film's present with the Champ waking up on the trainer's table, getting his knuckles and fists bound, and, then, going out to do battle with the challenger for the championship.  Everyone in the Champ's lower class neighborhood has bet on their local hero.  They want to see a Jewish boxer win to vindicate them after the horrors of the concentration camps.  Peg is in the blood-thirsty crowd and Alice, the lounge singer, who has demanded that the Champ throw the match.  The Champ has taken $60,000 laboriously accumulated from his fighting and extracted it from Peg's bank account (she's acting as the custodian of his money) to invest in a bet against himself.  This means that if he wins the fight, he will lose his entire nest-egg, money that he was planning to spend on his wedding to Peg -- the two of them have now reconciled.  Charley can't bring himself to throw the fight in an obvious way and spends fourteen rounds getting pummeled into a bloody mess by the challenger -- most of the time, he just hangs onto the kid while the up-and-coming boxer pounds him to a pulp.  And, now, it's the fifteenth round and the Champ is half-dead from the beating that he's endured.  So he rises from his corner to face the challenger as the bloodthirsty crowd howls and the flashbulbs ignite like bombs and blood is pouring from his face...

The movie is brilliantly made, savagely and efficiently paced,, and wonderfully acted.  The situation is trite but compelling.  Robert Rossen directed this picture based on a script by Abe Polonsky who would direct the famous noir, Force of Evil ,with Garfield (aka Jacob Garfinkel) in the following year.  Rossen fell into disrepute with HUAC, John Garfield died after refusing to "name names" at 39 in 1952, and Abe Polonsky was blacklisted for twenty years, not returning to movies until the 1969 Western with Robert Redford, Tell them that Willy Boy is Here.  Body and Soul is strangely familiar and, as I watched, I felt a strong sense of deja vu -- the picture contains every fight movie ever made.  

Notes on the Afton Film Festival (Rampart, Arkansas, Sisu, The Hunt, Obsession, No Sleep until Madison, Zardoz, Gun Crazy)

 Dave Herreid hosts a gathering at his home on the St. Croix river near Afton, Minnesota.  Participants bring DVD copies of films to screen one after another from Friday evening until Sunday morning.  The movies are characteristically action and horror films but there is wide variety of pictures on offer.  There's excellent food prepared on the premises and good conversation.  If you want, you can drink all day and night.  The setting is idyllic, at the base of a bluff overlooking the St. Croix with the mighty river coursing by a stone's throw from the house.  The river is vast and powerful, lined by steep hills, and, in the autumn, with leaves falling and brush bleeding red and gold colors all over the landscape, the view from the river is spectacular enough to distract you from the mayhem on screen -- it's more technicolor than technicolor with the deep blue of the St. Croix background to friezes and tapestries of colored leaves.  

Here are the movies that I saw on Friday evening (November 6) and Saturday (November 7):

Rampart is a morose cop movie starring Woody Harrelson as a nasty self-pitying policeman fighting a brutality charge that seems well-founded.  It's an effectively filmed movie with characters framed in traps of foreground obstructions, vivid and sizzling scenes of night-time LA, and pungent tough dialogue.  The movie isn't very good, an uneven mixture of European Art Film and Hollywood cop action.  The dialogue is mostly written by James Ellroy, the famous crime novelist, but it's not particularly persuasive.  The movie invokes Abe Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant with regard to the self-destructive protagonist, but there's really no conflict.  The movie is set up for Woody Harrelson's character to get his comeuppance in a satisfying way -- but this would conflict with Ellroy's hard Right politics -- and so the movie ends as a sort limp compromise:  Harrelson isn't happy and his prospects are miserable, but he's not destroyed either.  Rampart was made in 2011 and directed by Oren Moverman.     .

Arkansas is about drug-dealing in the titular State, with forays into Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.  The movie has an excellent cast, good locations, and a witty script.  But it's predictable and, for some reason that I can't quite identify, seems weirdly abstract and lackluster.  Perhaps, this deficiency arises from the fact that the characters are not interesting (with one exception) and, therefore, we aren't emotionally invested in their rather squalid fates.  The picture opens with an epigraph from Charles Portis (quoting Dog of the South); Portis is an acquired taste, an Arkansas novelist who wrote True Grit, and about five other excellent books.  Portis is very funny although his humor is bone-dry and acerbic and just one twist away from tragedy.  Arkansas hopes to mimic his style, but lacks the bizarre and obsessive characters, generally entangled with secret societies, that animate Portis' books -- so the imitation doesn't work very well.  The picture follows the misadventures of two low-grade drug-dealers played by Liam Hemsworth (the handsome if dimwitted crook) and his odd couple partner played by the plump, cherubic-looking Clark Duke.  The couple go to work for an eccentric park ranger played by John Malkovich who moonlights running his part of the drug-dealing franchise.  Malkovich's character works for the enigmatic "Frog" and a woman simply called "Her."  Malkovich's performance is the best thing in the movie; the actor uses a heavy "moonbeams and magnolias" accent and flits around in an impressively weird way -- he's the only thing in the movie that seems to be channeling Charles Portis and is the kind of character that the writer celebrates in his books.  But Malkovich's park ranger is assassinated in the movie's first 15 minutes and, with his absence, the wind goes out of the picture's sails.  What remains is a convoluted plot, heavy on brutal killings, including a guy disabled by having his eyes gouged out.  Vince Vaughn is good in the Jon Hamm role -- that is, the handsome movie-star idol head of the operation called the "Frogman,"  he's smarmy, self-confident, and treacherous.  The picture doesn't seem to properly exploit its fine cast and vivid location filming and goes nowhere.  The film had the misfortune of being released during COVID and has vanished without a trace.  It's a 2020 movie directed by the actor Clark Duke.

The Hunt is a variant on The Most Dangerous Game, a reliable narrative that combines horror and action:  a villain or a coterie of villains conspire to kidnap and, then, hunt humans for their entertainment.  Usually, the human prey, at great disadvantage are massacred except for one plucky character who puts paid to the evil plot.  The Hunt is genuinely funny with some laugh-out-loud moments and reasonably exciting as an action film.  The plot twist in this movie, which is also political satire, is that the villains are radical liberals, far left of Hilary Clinton, who spew obnoxious "woke" rhetoric while conspiring to slaughter "deplorables" -- that is, hapless hillbilly types who cling to their "religion and guns."  The Left vs. Right aspect of the movie gives it a buzz and elevates what would just be an ordinary portmanteau of gruesome killings into something approximating political satire.  The film is also pleasantly surprising (at least for the first hour) in that the high profile actors are all blown to bits (pink mist) in the opening scenes in the movie.  Becky Gilpin is good as the shapely hillbilly avenger.  She manages to kill all the bad guys, who are perpetually bickering about their diets and sympathy for Native Americans and other minorities.  The picture ends with a lengthy and gory cat fight between Gilpin and the last survivor among the murderous radical Democrats.  There are a number of good gags:  at one point, a liberal couple have poisoned food in the gas station with convenience store that they are pretending to operate as "Ma and Pa" of "Ma and Pa's Gas and Sundries."  The husband gets thirsty and downs a soda from the store inventory:  "Stop!" Ma shriek, "That's poison!"  "You poisoned the soda pop?" the man says incredulously.  "No," Ma says self-righteously, "it's got 40 grams of sugar in it."  In another amusing scene, a leftist girl warrior is wounded.  The heroine points her gun at her.  "You're not gonna say that I should spare you because you're a girl?" the heroine asks.  The wounded woman takes a beat, considers, and, then, applies her political principles to the question.  "No," she says with predictable consequences.  This entertaining movie was released in 2020, drowned in the Covid tsunami, and was directed by Craig Zobel.       .

Sisu is a Finnish war movie that is primarily an excuse to stage a series of ultra-violent killings.  The movie takes place in Lappland during 1944 when German troops (here simply called "the Nazis") are trying to flee the country, retreating through scorched earth that they have created by burning towns and wrecking infra-structure.  The word Sisu is said to be untranslatable --in Finnish, it means something like an "indomitable" and "implacable" zeal to keep fighting even in the face of overwhelming obstacles.  The hero is lone horseman who has already killed over 300 Russians in the Winter War.  He rides the tundra like a cowboy riding the range and film's landscapes are spectacular, vast expanses of open terrain completely treeless and blotched with acres of glowing orange and yellow lichens.  The hero has a dog which, unfortunately, doesn't make it to the last reel. (Correction:  I missed a shot at the end showing the dog very much alive and riding happily in the side-car of the hero's motorcycle; David Ward, who was one of the Afton participants, reminded me of this image.) Like Rambo in Vietnam, the indestructible protagonist slaughters untold numbers of Nazis, killing them with arrows and knives and machine gun fire, dropping them out of planes, squashing them like bugs under the treads of tanks, etc.  A group of eight women who are being hauled over the tundra in an armored personnel carrier (and being raped periodically by the Nazis -- so it is implied) are armed with machine guns by the lone avenger and slaughter the Germans who have been abusing them.  Throughout the picture, the hero is bashed, torn open repeatedly, shot and stabbed, and gets his face smashed to pulp.  But nothing stops this guy.  At one point, when he has been nearly disembowled, the hero cauterizes the wound with a blow torch and, then, none the worse for wear continues to massacre Nazis.  The movie is silly and has no suspense at all.  After all, Superman wins all his battles.  Further, the movie lacks a German antagonist worthy of this Finnish ultra-warrior.  He's able to kill the Germans with absurd ease and there's never a sense that, despite his dozen or so wounds, he is ever in any real danger.  The movie uses evidence of real German atrocities, corpse dangling from utility poles, burned villages, and systematic rape, as the basis for its interminable series of killings.  This seems questionable to me and, therefore, it's hard to justify the picture in any reasonable terms -- it's brutish and meretricious to boot.  

Obsession is the best and most assured of the films that I saw at Afton.  The picture is a horror movie based, more or less, on a plot akin to Jacob's "The Monkey's Paw" -- that is, a cautionary parable about being cautious as to what you wish for.  A callow but likeable young man works at a music store.  There are two attractive female co-workers, one of them hoping to get into a college to study music (she ends up getting accepted to Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.)  The young man is enamored with the other girl, Ricky.  When she loses her necklace down a drain, the hero goes into a New Age store and buys not only a replacement necklace but also a wish-granting twig -- if you snap the twig and make a wish, it will be granted.  (The novelty item costs a reasonable $6.99.)  The young man makes a wish that his co-worker Ricky "will love him more than anyone else in the world."  The wish is granted and the young man quickly finds himself in bed with the beautiful, but, now palpably insane Ricky.  She is so psychotically devoted to him that when he goes to work, she stands in one place by the door, waiting like a faithful puppy -- periodically, she smashes a broken mug into her face until she is cut and bloody and, when the protagonist comes home, he finds her gory, standing in a puddle of her own urine and excrement since she was unable to leave her post where she was maintaining a vigil as to his return.  Ricky is possessive.  When her boyfriend meets the other co-worker, who has just learned the happy news that she has been admitted to Luther College, Ricky smashes through the windows in the car where the two are innocently talking and, then, slams the girl's head into the steering column until she is dead, her face crushed into a scum of blood and tissue, and her eyes popped out of her head.  Ricky, then, takes the corpse and arranges it into a tableau in the scary haunted-house where the boyfriend lives (it was his grandmother's house):  The body is displayed naked with its legs splayed wide open and the pudding of its face cocked back over its shoulders.  Needless to say, the situation isn't good.  There's no way to reverse the curse without someone dying.  And, the manufacturer of the bliss-bestowing twig isn't helpful.  When the hero calls to make a warranty claim, the company representative, a drawling stoner with a southern accent, says that he's sorry that the young man is unhappy but that it's no bed of roses for Ricky either, treating the phone-caller to a series of panicked shrieks by the entrapped woman.  The movie is very grim and effective.  It is brilliantly paced for a film of this sort.  Nothing unusual happens for the first twenty minutes and Ricky's desperate efforts to snare and bed the reluctant hero (who now regrets his wish) takes another half hour with the girl offering herself in a cringe-worthy manner.  The actual extreme imagery and horror doesn't begin until the movie is mostly complete and near its ending.  This is a thought-provoking and depressing, if very frightening, horror movie and it's certainly memorable.  The picture was made by first-time director Curry Baker and released in 2025.

No Sleep until Madison is a very likeable road picture, made on a low budget in Wisconsin with very good acting -- the cast of unknown actors (or unknown in 2002 when the movie was released) are extremely accomplished; one of the participants at the Festival, a man who is an actor himself told me that the players were probably professional theater people mostly from Chicago, a hypothesis that I think is reliable and likely true.  The film's premise is that a rather pathetic High School teacher and hockey enthusiast annually attends the play-off game for the State High School championship in Madison, Wisconsin.  For a week, he, and his buddies, attend games in the tournament leading up to the championship's final contest.  This requires the teacher (played very well by the stand-up comedian Jim  Gaffigan) and friends to travel around Wisconsin in a battered, and mechanically compromised van owned by a dry-cleaning company in Lake Mills, a small town near Madison.  Its winter and the weather is questionable and the High School teacher has retained a kid from his classes to record the expedition on video-tape -- this is Dave. (Dave's video footage is cut into the action and provides a sort of counterpoint to the narration.)  There are four other men, all about the same age, participating in the road trip -- one is a low-level corporate executive in a family company, another is an exuberant party animal, a bit like John Belush, suffering from gout; one guy's wife is struggling with a new-born infant at home and there is another man who can sing in beautiful, if completely made-up, French.  One by one, the characters accompanying Jim Gaffigan's hockey-obsessed, control-freak leader drop out of the excursion.  The Belushi-like guy with gout gets slammed in the head with a ball when the troop is playing broom-ball on a frozen lake -- he's concussed and has to be hospitalized.  The others are summoned off the road by family obligations and Dave gives up on the video chronicle. The van is being trailed by a mysterious black pick-up truck and, by the film's end, Gaffigan's character is trapped in the crashed vehicle with a badly bruised leg that immobilizes and the winter cold slowly freezing to death.  Have no fear, all will be well in the end.  The film has a sweet, naive spirit but is cynical enough about it's characters' serious foibles to be persuasive as well.  The road trip plot is effective and well-managed and the writing is very sharp.  The characters are all suffering from a sort of mid-life crisis or malaise, although they are only in their early thirties -- responsibilities have caught up with them and mutilated their hopes for the future.  The tone of the picture if comedy mixed with melancholy --it's "bitter-sweet" if that term is permissible.  The Wisconsin milieu is sharply observed and the excellent ensemble of players keeps everything light, nimble, but, also, sufficiently nostalgic for the movie's situations to have a "dying fall."  This is a very good movie but one that you may have trouble finding.  The film's title is emblazoned on a tee-shirt meaning no one will sleep and, instead, stay up all night partying:  but the printer who silk-screens the shirts ends up writing "NO SHEEP UNTIL MADISON.  This appealing movie was directed by ? -- I didn't write the name thinking I could get  the information off the Internet.  Alas, the movie is not on Wikipedia and doesn't appear in any way in Gaffigan's own wiki page.    

Zardoz (1974) is a bloviating, bloated mess of a movie directed by John Boorman.  It has some remarkable scenes and imagery that I have remembered for many years -- I saw the picture on the Big Screen in Hopkins when it was released -- I was in my second year of college then.  Over the years, my memory has sifted from my recollections the long, dull, and laughably pretentious dialogue scenes, the implausible plot, and the idiotic performances of the principals, including the nearly nude Sean Connery who runs around in a loin-cloth for the whole movie.  (The picture is so bad that it even makes Charlotte Rampling look stupid and unprepossessing.)  Boorman is good with locations and set direction and the movie has people traipsing around in loose harem girl costumes, both male and female, in a manor-house above a chilly tarn in northern mountains in Britain.  Some of the effects are very good.  But it's too much and Boorman who wrote the dialogue extends all of the colloquies beyond any reasonable measure, his camera lingering as if each word was a mystical gem of wisdom.  (The movie it most resembles is Monty Python's Search for the Holy Grail except it's not nearly as funny.)  The plot involves a ravaged world in the far future in which elites live in structures called "vortices" protected by force-fields.  In an odd way, the movie rhymes neatly with the film The Hunt.  As it happens, the liberal, psychedelically infused communities in the vortices have engaged savage warriors like Sean Connery's "Zed" to massacre the "deplorables" -- primitive savages who are gunned down by horsemen armed with automatic weapons.  The warriors are supplied by guns by a floating head or styrofoam mask that vomits firearms and ammo to the death squads who have been taught to worship the blimp-sized aeronautical conveyance said to be the god, "Zardoz."  The head proclaims as its oracle:  the gun is good, because it kills and eliminates brutes; the penis is bad because it leads to more reproduction.  The elites in the vortex manor are sexually impotent; they don't need to reproduce because they all have eternal life and can't be killed.  If torn asunder, they are simply reincarnated -- there's a frieze of people waiting to be reborn displayed like trophies under cellophane on the walls to the bubble where the elites gather to make their decision.  When Sean Connery turns up at the vortex manor house, he creates a stir because his penis still works and his erection (in an unintentionally risible scene) stirs the women, and some of the men, in the commune into a frenzy.  Boorman has a great visionary imagination and there are some spectacular sequences in the movie (it's mostly scored to Beethoven's Sixth and Seventh symphonies), but there is less here than meets the eye.  Boorman's best films, with the exception of his autobiographical movie Hope and Glory are adaptations of novels written by someone else -- I am thinking of Deliverance, Point Blank and his over-the-top film version of Malory, Excaliber.  (In some ways, the failed Zardoz seems to be a sketch for some of the effects and material in Excalibur.)  The picture, which I remembered with warmth, is unintentionally funny and unendurably dull.    

Gun Crazy directed in 1950 is a cheap film noir that is pretty good and very inventive, but, also, I should observe, not as good as it is reputed to be.  A boy, played by Russ Tamblyn is obsessed with guns and we see him stealing a pistol in the opening scene, a bravura set piece involving a broken shop window, reflections in the shattered glass, and a gun sliding across a rain-slick street to land at the foot of a dour sheriff.  There's a juvenile hearing and the lad is sent to Reform School.  Eight years later, he shows up in town, still obsessed with guns and shooting.  At a lurid, rinky-dink carnival, he outshoots a lady marksman dressed like Annie Oakley.  The lady is the "possession" (so he thinks) of a belligerent, conman who runs the target-shooting show.  The protagonist, who is "gun-crazy", liberates the lady sharpshooter and together they go on a crime spree.  The woman is aggressive, a vicious Lady Macbeth and she has no compunction about murdering people.  The doomed lovers end up in the High Sierra with the dragnet closing in on them.  They die together on a small islet in a swamp under the snow-capped crest of the range.  The movie is efficiently made and runs like finely built clock, but it's a little bit dull and the acting is mediocre to the point of being forgettable.  The movie has a reputation for brilliance but I think this is overblown.  It's a tough, cynical, serviceable noir.  But that's it. No less, no more. 

Days and Nights in the Forest

 Four bachelors in their late twenties or early thirties make a weekend trip to an impoverished rural area about 300 miles from where they live in Kolkata (Calcutta).  The plan is to relax in a rustic cabin, putting civilization (as they call it) and the disappointments and pressures of their careers on pause during their sojourn in nature.  This is a time-honored premise, both in horror films (for instance, Deliverance) and comedic buddy movies (Sideways to name an example).  In Satyajit Ray's 1970 film, nothing much happens.  There's a modicum of horror but, remarkably, the self-absorbed protagonists of Days and Nights in the Forest aren't even aware of it -- they end their adventure in nature the same way that they began it:  arrogant, selfish, and, more or less, pleased with themselves.  There are no lessons learned.  From minute to minute, the film records mundane encounters without suspense or drama and the movie's observation is so disciplined and unobtrusive that there's no sense of anything momentous occurring. Yet, the film is extraordinarily dense and complex -- accounting for its effects and interpreting their meaning is a task that far surpasses the space available in this note.  Any reasonably thorough assessment of this 116 minutes movie would take far longer to read than the time required to watch the film from beginning to end.  This is the measure of a masterpiece in film history -- the movies to which we return time and time again are so complex in their emotional effects, so difficult to exactly describe, and so precise in their diagnostic observations that they are, in effect, impossible to account for -- any raw description of the plot and its meaning inevitably falsifies the nuances of what we have seen.  In Days and Nights in the Forest, the nuances are, ultimately, what matters.  

We catch up with our four heroes as they are bickering at a gas station and casually bullying the pump attendants.  The men speak Bengali and they are planning a trip to the wilds of Palumbo, a tribal reserve, it seems, a day's ride from Calcutta.  There's nothing heroic about this quartet and so I will describe them as protagonists, aware, I admit, that there is no antagonist in the film -- the conflicts that we see exposed involve inadequacies and lack of self-knowledge and self-confidence in the four men themselves.  Ashim is an up-and-coming salaryman, a go-getter in the corporation where he works.  Sanjoy is unemployed, also formerly employed in some corporate enterprise.  Sanjoy and Ashim were once partners in a literary enterprise -- they edited a college literary magazine together and pride themselves on "never publishing anything bad."  These endeavors, however, are now long behind them.  In the car driven by the leader of the group, Ashim, Sanjoy reads a description of the rural area in the forest to which they are driving -- it seems to be a sort of 19th century travel memoir and describes the tribal women as "dark as ebony" and mostly naked, an account that interests the other men.  Hari, who is very sleepy and depressed, is a cricket player who has been dumped by his stylish girlfriend.  Ashim and Sanjoy advise him to take her in hand and beat her up -- they are only half joking.  (A flashback, one of two in the movie, shows Hari's girlfriend dressed in European haute couture rejecting him -- he tries to make her stay with him in the simplest way possible, that is, by grabbing her wrist and holding her in his apartment.  She pushes him away and departs, presumably, forever.)  The fourth man is a short rolypoly figure that the other three patronize and treat as their jester -- this fellow, Shekhar, is along to make amusing cynical remarks and lubricate with humor the hard edges existing between the other three men.

The foursome is excited to see the "forest".  In fact, it's a miserable, barren scrub brush of withered trees with some distant dark hills (the film is shot in beautiful black and white) and what seems to be a dried-up lake bed stretching away from the sun-scorched sticks and branches of the embattled trees toward the remote mountains.  (It is apparently the dry season in this place and the trees are all denuded and seem to be the stark remnants of a forest destroyed by fire.)  For some reason, that I didn't understand, the four men stop short of their ultimate destination and pulling up at an impoverished village pay one of the young men lounging around -- unemployment seems to be pretty much 100% in this neck of the woods -- to take them to a forest bungalow.  This is a nice cabin located behind a checkpoint that says that the bungalows are not be used without the permission of the agency that manages the forest.  (It seems to be similar to a cabin that you can rent in a State or National Park in the United States.)  The foursome are so entitled that they don't think rules apply to them and, so, they simply appropriate the bungalow bribing the watchman for their use of the cabin.  (The watchman, whose wife is gravely ill, fears being fired over his agreement to let the four men use the government cabin without reservations.)  As they bribe the watchman, one of the men says cynically something like "Thank heavens for corruption!")  Later a stuttering forest ranger appears in a jeep and tries to get the men to move from the bungalow where they are squatting.  They ignore him.  At last, the game warden himself appears, again threatening the men with expulsion, but he's also "workable" and can be corrupted, although his price is a bit higher.  On the first night at the cabin, the men walk over to a nearby village where the townsfolk, including their somewhat disreputable women, are all getting drunk.  The tourists drink the local firewater and get very drunk themselves.  Hari, upset about the loss of his girlfriend, is fascinated by one of the "dusky village maidens" who, in fact, turns out to be a prostitute.  (The part is played in "brownface" with make-up that causes the woman to look a bit like a player in a 19th century American minstrel show.)  The next day the men are very hungover.  Some of the village women with whom they were flirting, including Duli, the girl in "brownface", come to the bungalow and ask for employment.  (The girls mention that they sometimes earn a living dancing at various small-town "smokers" in the vicinity.)  The watchman, who is trying to perform his job, drives away the girls, observing that they are "bad women."  An ambiguous shot makes it look like Duli has stolen Hari's wallet.  On the dusty road, Shekhar sees two stylish women strolling with parasols, one of them wearing "a sari, and the other slacks."  This intrigues the men who walk over to an adjacent Dacha where there's an old man and his grandson and the two women enjoying their holiday retreat in the blasted forest.  The women are Aparna, the cultured old man's daughter, and Jaya, the old man's daughter-in-law.  The women are interested in Ashim and Sanjoy and play badminton with them.  They make a date for the next morning and the women promise to serve them breakfast with eggs (a running joke is that the men want eggs but no eggs seem to be found anywhere in the desperately poor vicinity) at 8:30 am.  The four go to dinner in the village and start drinking the local brew.  Once again, they get very drunk and can barely walk.  On the road in the darkness, they perform a "twist" dance from America much to the amusement of the women who observe them from their big car -- they are coming back from visiting relatives in a nearby town.  The next morning the men are embarrassed when they oversleep and miss the promised breakfast although Jaya and Aparna send them the meal in a canister, apologizing themselves for making the boys get up so early for their omelets.  Hari is missing his wallet and thinks that a local boy whom they employ as a go-fer has stolen it from the bungalow.  Hari attacks the kid and beats him up.  In the afternoon, the four men go to see the women again and set up a picnic on the sun-baked grass overlooking the flats of the desiccated lake.  (Periodically, we see processions of men walking around on some sort of religious errands -- the upper-class Hindus in the bungalow just ignore these small, forlorn parades.)  It turns out that Hari lost his wallet playing badminton with the girls and they are happy to return it to him.  It's obvious now that Aparna and Jaya are flirting with the two salarymen and hoping to ensnare them.  Hari, the best-looking of the group, is uninterested in the women -- he's got his sights set on Duli, the tribal girl.  At the picnic, the men and woman play a memory game; Aparna, who is uncanny in some respects, obviously lets Ashim win -- this seems to be part of her seduction strategy.  The six characters, then, depart for a local fair in a nearby village where Jaya wants to buy some tribal jewelry.  The couples (Ashim and Aparna as well as Sanjoy and Jaya) ride on a primitive Ferris wheel and Jaya buys some bracelets and necklaces. Shekhar, who turns out to be a gambling degenerate, plays some variant on roulette with the locals.  Hari sneaks off into the woods where he has arranged a tryst with the prostitute Duli.  This sets up the film's last act which involves thwarted attempts at lovemaking between the two couples, Aparna and Ashim and Jaya and Sanjoy.  (Aparna's mother was burned up somehow and recounts a story of how Aparns fainted when she saw fire burning on a distant mountain; Jaya's husband, Aparna's brother and the old man's son, has committed suicide three years earlier.) After their night of unrequited (or requited) love as the case may be, the Calcutta bachelor tourists return to the big city.  Just before they leave, they receive a package of about a dozen hard-boiled eggs.  

This bare summary of the plot doesn't suggest the film's richness and density of imagery.  The grandfather sings a long song, apparently a hymn to Krishna -- I don't know what this is supposed to mean other than to signify that "love is in the air", but this is one of many touches that establish the palpable, breathing and vivid "lifeworld" that the movie presents.  The men draw water from a deep well dug on the premises -- their bathing at the well, shaving, and pouring water from the well is a visual leit-motif that informs the movie, an encounter of an urban Indian middle-class with its tribal and village forebears.  One of the women meditates, apparently while listening to Joan Baez and the Beatles Rubber Soul, in a sort of tower that looks like a deer stand.  One of the other leit-motifs in the movie is conversation about how the animals have ceased to come into this part of the forest in recent years.  The film is not without minor lapses --- a repeated shot of tribal women doing some sort of dance is intercut as punctuation with the love scenes in the last part of the movie; this seems very slightly patronizing and possibly gratuitous, although Ray is a very clear and lucid filmmaker and he uses the images instead of fade-outs to crosscut the villagers with the love affairs occurring nearby between the tourists.  The movie, probably, has many poignant things to say about India in the seventies, a period of great and near disastrous turbulence (riots in the streets and the rebellion of the Naxalite Maoists).  I'm not able to comment with any degree of credibility on these issues.  More accessibly to American viewers, the film is an important commentary on male privilege, female desire, and the politics of gender and sex, not only in India but in the West as well.  The rather uncanny Aparna, obviously the most intelligent figure in the movie, acknowledges to Ashim that she has intended to "crush his self-confidence a bit", a peculiar remark but one that is plausible in light of Ashim's arrogance.  There is a great deal of sadness in the movie but it is repressed, and kept out of sight.  Modern India seems grounded in a past that to use Faulkner's phrase "isn't even past" at all.  Similarly, modern sex and gender roles are ruled from apparitions from the grave of past and historical relations between the sexes.  This is a movie that seems on its face so inconsequential that it takes a while to grasp the implications and ongoing vitality of the things that we have seen.  It has much of the gravitas of Chekhov, a light touch that bears a heavy weight of significance.  

Ali G: Who iz I?

 Sasha Baron Cohen's new picture, Ali G: Who iz I? has a narrative of sorts aided and abetted by various dupes that the director cons into appearing in the film.  The movie is intermittently very funny but, like all Cohen's pictures, the story of the film's making and the elaborate pranks that are played on his hapless victims is probably more interesting than anything on-screen.  Cohen's movies posit that the embarrassing (and, in this case, probably criminal) behavior that he cons his participants into displaying for the camera is a form of revelation -- Cohen is merely midwifing into existence vicious traits that are latent in his marks.  However, there is a sour taste of condescension to many of the more outrageous sequences -- it's not a crime or, even, vice to be extremely stupid and Cohen launches his pranks with cosmopolitan sophistication using all the resources of movie magic at his disposal against some very dim bulbs indeed.  The gags in which he entangles his unwitting protagonists are exceptionally complicated and, indeed, expensive -- they rely on carefully selected confederates, long and elaborate quasi-military training sessions that invest his dupes in the action, prosthetics and movie-grade special effects.  In the face of these highly engineered resources invested in what are essentially mean-spirited practical jokes, his moronic interlocutors have little or no ability to resist the deception practiced against them -- often, the movie feels like the highly sophisticated London comedian "punching down" on poor fools who are the worst kinds of fools, that is people who don't know that they are idiots.

The film's narrative involves Ali G, fallen on hard times, with no money and his baronial mansion repossessed.  (For the uninitiated, Ali G is a caricature of a certain kind of Londoner who will be unknown to most Americans -- Ali G is a white hipster who speaks in a bizarre sort of quasi-Jamaican patois, dresses in elaborate Afro-futurist garb, and fancies himself a multicultural nomad with sufficient self-esteem to confidently interview Nobel physicists, politicians like Newt Gingrich and other Republicans, and cultural figures.  He has the temerity to ask the astronaut "Buzz" Aldrin for an opinion as to whether man "will ever walk on the sun.") Al G's longtime girlfriend, who is equally dim, is heavily pregnant and the plot, as it were, involves his agonized conflict between pursuing his career as a hip-hop pundit and interviewer or retiring to England to be a good father to his prospective progeny.  Ali G is on hiatus from his show at HBO, a 20 year lay-off as it happens, but is scheming to get back in the good graces of the Cable company so that he can return to the air.  He believes HBO has sent him a fax offering him 3.2 million dollars to do another program and so with "Me Julie" as he calls his girlfriend, he flies to Hollywood to return to show business.  But it turns out that the fax from HBO, discovered when Ali has to pawn his old fax machine (when it's plugged in, the thing spits out a letter from HBO) was sent in 2004 and the offer is no longer valid.  This proves highly embarrassing to Ali who has invited his agent and about 10 sycophants to an expensive banquet (over $12,000 not including tip).  Ali's "Me Julie" has bought a Brentwood Mansion for thirty million dollars but, alas, Ali has no money to pay for the dwelling.  Like Peter Sellers, Sasha Baron Cohen performs several different roles in his movies.  In this film, he goes about disguised as a vengeful ultra-woke Liberal, who insults a conference of Black participants in Oakland by railing against Ali G for having "appropriated wrongfully" Black culture.  He tells the people at the conference, who roll their eyes and walk out on him, that Ali G is an imposter and that they are insufficiently incensed about Ali's depredations.  A question arises as to whether Ali G has any African blood in him at all.  This leads to a subplot in which Ali has anal sex with the liberal who is using his rectum as a depository for DNA that he will use to show that Ali is English (or Scottish as it happens) but not Black at all.  Meanwhile, Cohen as a vicious Israeli spy ("not a member of Mossad" he repeatedly says) recruits a group of right-wing morons to kidnap Ali's "Me Julie".  The claim is that Ali is a terrorist so sexually active that he has 140,000 children, an army waiting to be activated as a Fifth Column in southern California.  If Ali and Julie's baby is born on American soil, it will be a birth right citizen, thus naturalizing (somehow) the other 140,000 nascent terrorists who are all members of the same family.  The not-Mossad spy and his recruits load Julie into a panel truck and drive her to the border with Mexico.  She, then, gives birth in a graphic and disgusting scene, sufficiently gruesome to persuade the Right Wing Republicans, that they have a real terrorist baby in their clutches.  Believing that the animatronic baby is real, they load the kid onto a drone and, then, literally drop what they believe is a living infant, about sixty feet out of sky into Mexico.  The leftist woke professor appears and there's a shoot-out.  The not-Mossad Israeli agent provocateur has equipped the Republican dupes with bulging fake buttocks that shoot bullets out of the anus.  The buttock gun is armed by using a prosthetic penis to pump pressure into the air gun rectum.  This means that in the shoot-out the Republican marks are vigorously pumping their penises to generate sufficient force to fire projectiles out of their prosthetic anus muzzles.  Ali has been working on a Cable show produced by a malign South American called "Free Speech".  On that show, Ali as host supervises a game show in which contestants pick up mannequins (men, women and infants) and hurl them into a mock-up of a concentration camp shower facility in which the spigots pump out Zyklon B.  Ali's contestants who enthusiastically load the shower-execution chambers include some other right-wing figures including George Santos.  In the end after the baby is rescued and the buttock-gun shoot out results in the death of the liberal professor, Ali decides that it is best that he remain with Me Julie in England and try to be a better man by serving as a responsible father to his new infant.  It's a sentimental and heart-warming ending for the movie.

This sort of thing is a matter of taste.  It's amusing to see right-wing bigots exposed as Hitler-adoring Fascists, but the pranks are so incredibly complicated and far-fetched that it's hard to know whether the dupes are really participating or just humoring Ali G who seems to be insane.  (George Santos, for instance, is obviously in on the joke.)  I'm always a wee bit suspicious of comedy that plays so explicitly upon the viewer's biases and prejudices -- although most comedy has some element of this sort of derision and comedy, as it is often, said is not pretty picture but really a carnival of cruelty.  There are moments of comic genius in the film and it is sometimes very funny, but there's a element of cruelty to the pranks which is troubling.  At the end of the movie, one of the dupes of the "woke" professor character kindly consoles Al G who is weeping when his heritage is exposed to him.  "There's nothing wrong with being a 'proud Scottish man'," the man says.  

Slow West

 Slow West (2015) is a Western made by first-time Scottish director, John MacLean.  It's a surprisingly conventional genre picture with elements influenced by Jim Jarmusch experimental Western, Dead Man.  The film has a well-staged action sequences and a clear narrative arc.  The movie is mostly silent with action articulating the story -- as a result, there are some features of the narrative that were not clear to me.  The acting partakes in the "strong and silent" style of 1950's Westerns -- indeed, the movie could be a picture made by Anthony Mann or Budd Boetticher around 1960.  The picture was shot in New Zealand, the landscapes "down under" standing in for Colorado.  A vast arid and brown valley under a range of glacier-capped peaks is familiar to viewers who have seen Jane Campion's Power of the Dog.  Lush green forests and curious hoodoo rock formations of pale chalk standing above a verdant ravine are featured in the movie.  There is not a single moment when the viewer is convinced that the movie was shot in Colorado -- every single landscape screams New Zealand although it's hard for me to identify exactly why this should be so.  (It may be a residual effect of seeing these landscapes and forests in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films.)

A taciturn youth Jay sleeps outside with his gun cradled in his arms.  He has come to the American West to search for a girl that he loves named Rose.  (We see some inconsequential flashbacks of Rose and Jay in Scotland; it seems that Rose (or her father) may have accidentally killed a man in Scotland and decamped to Colorado to avoid the consequences.)  Jay runs into a bounty hunter named Silas who is involved in the massacre of some Indians.  Jay and Silas travel together to a remote 19th century convenience store that happens to be robbed when they are shopping for provisions.  Two desperate Swedish immigrants, a man and woman, are the robbers and they get themselves killed in the lonely C-store -- their deaths leave orphaned a ten year old girl and her blonde six-year old brother.  Jay and Silas continue their trek, callously abandoning the helpless children. Silas has torn a poster from the C-store's message board offering a $2000 bounty for bringing to justice, dead or alive, Rose and her father.  Silas decides to use Jay to guide him to the fugitives, presumably so he can kill them and collect the bounty.  A man named Payne leads a gang of about eight mounted bad hombres who are also bounty hunters -- they may have been the desperadoes who massacred the Indians in the opening scenes.  And to complete the picture, there is a guy named Hawk who has an elaborate sniper-rifle in a funereal black case also hunting for Rose and her Pa.  Jay and Silas have various low-key adventures including getting stuck in a flash flood in which a mountain creek overruns its banks and nearly drowns them.  Jay separates from Silas, mistrusting the bounty hunter's motives.  He runs into a German named Werner who is, in fact, a parody version of a younger Werner Herzog. Werner sneaks off in the night with Jay's gun and horse.  Unfortunately for Werner, Silas is lurking nearby and the bounty hunter appears in the next scene leading an extra horse and with Jay's firearms.  It turns out that Pa and Rose are living in a shack with about 20 miles of empty space on all sides of it -- the shack is ridiculously isolated in a field of tall grass with oddly shaped tassels.  Hawk laboriously sets up his sniper rifle to gun down Pa and Rose from a distance of a quarter mile.  (I don't why he just doesn't sneak up to their house and kill them, but, by genre convention, he has to make use of his spectacular firearm.)  At the shack, Pa and Rose are living under the protection of Kotari, a handsome Noble Savage straight out of Fenimore Cooper -- we see him bringing two rabbits that he has killed for supper to the shack where the fugitives are living.  Hawk guns down Pa at long-range but, then, is shot from behind by members of Payne's gang.  Jay has been tied-up for some obscure reason by Silas -- possibly to prevent him from stopping Silas in his efforts to kill or apprehend for bounty the two fugitives.  (Plot summaries say that Silas ties-up Jay to protect him -- this seems implausible and unsupported by the film.)  Payne's group besieges the hut in which Kotari and Rose make a last stand, defending themselves with flaming arrows, long-guns, and revolvers.  The bad hombres are mostly killed but Silas gets badly wounded and is hors de combat.  Kotari, before he's gunned down, lights the nearby grassfields on fire with his flaming arrows.  After a pitched battle, the last of bounty hunters is shot by the badly hurt Silas who has switched sides and is now helping the good guys.  Rose guns down poor Jay when he darts into the shack to save her -- she thinks he's one of the bounty hunters.  The camera tours the casualties some of them burned up in the fire.  In the last scene, Silas is living in domestic bliss with Rose and the two Swedish children who were adopted by Payne's murderous gang but are now living with the ex-bounty hunter and his wife, Rose.  

The set-piece involving the siege of shack is excellently staged and, in general, MacLean shows skill with action scenes and violence -- a prerequisite for a director of Westerns.  The movie has lots of portentous, muted dialogue and, at times, the film's portrait of the West as a place full of eccentric isolates, loners and half-mute immigrants and inscrutable Indians, reminded me of Jarmusch's Western. (A source for this vision of the West pre-dating Jarmusch is Kurosawa's very strange and ineffable Dersu Uzula, another Western set in Siberia.) The landscapes are spectacular and MacLean lenses them beautifully with tiny figures scattered across a vast wilderness.  The movie is the length of an old Hollywood B-movie Western (like those of Boetticher and Mann) --it's about one hour and 23 minutes long.  I liked the picture but not as much as most of the critics who were greatly impressed by the film and lauded it as wonderfully innovative -- it's good, but not that good, and will seem innovative only to people not familiar with Hollywood's lower budget Westerns made in the fifties and sixties, pictures like Mann's Bend of the River or Boetticher's The Tall T.   That said, there's nothing wrong with Mann and Boettcher's Westerns which are satisfying in their own right and, so, nothing wrong with Slow West.