Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2009)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's latest film Tokyo Sonata is an unabashed message film, clearly making concerted effort to get across on-the-nose observations about the modern world and contemporary society to the viewer. This includes issues such as the family unit, militarism, the financial bedrock of common living, and, in classic Kiyoshi Kurosawa fashion, generation gaps and the plight of the underestimated female. Yes, the K-man has never been coy with his hyper-vivid worldviews, but never has he been particularly plain-spoken, or tied to the literal. Here he is not setting his sights on the art-house audience. Instead of his usual MO, which is to work so heavily in allegory and microcosm, here he is willfully working towards heightening social perception by taking on simplicity and straight-forwardness.

This is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Milk. As Gus Van Sant does in his new film, Kurosawa seems to have also resolved not to stew any longer in the dark, mysterious recesses hid deep within inaccessible, repressed society -- a log line which very much describes both Kurosawa and Van Sant's output prior to 2008. There's nothing mysterious about an ordinary family, nor about their being brought to a breaking point by ordinary pressures of common life, nor about its all being result of the ordinariness of nations and their ideals of social order.

Cast off is the cryptic, for the most part, for both Van Sant and Kurosawa. Both resolve to engage with the prosaic, hectic, and rather dreary public world (be that politics or white-collar bubbles) by taking on society and hegemony, by loudly calling out the failings of the masses that think they do not have anything to hide, and by being so clearly proactive against common regimes of thought and "Elephant-in-the-Room" mores, that their bright, shining, near embarrassingly boisterous films will reach, inspire, and alight even a cinema philistine.

 Both filmmakers pull back on the art-house reins considerably, but manage to mix their art-house habits quite successfully with stories that often seem intentionally barbed and armor-fitted with story material and emotional hooks that verge on after-school special territory.

This time around, there is no need to brace yourself against numbing existential conclusions convinced of life's ephemera. This is a socially minded picture, and what is social-mindedness if not an effort to instill hope for continuance, progress, and change? It is this explicit campaign for change, through a plot engaged to the literal world, that rails this latest picture on a different track from Kurosawa's previous films. Even the film's nearest conduit to existential stupor - the mother character's escapade of longing - takes on the larger (or is it smaller?) significance by representing forwardly the Japanese Housewife, plagued by her social insignificance, as opposed to just a woman, plagued by her very existential being, as is depicted in Kurosawa's harrowing Seance (about a depressive female psychic who goes to terrible extremes to alleviate deadening, deeply-rooted feelings of existential worthlessness).

Tokyo Sonata is said to be Kiyoshi Kurosawa absorbing and filtering Ozu, but then again, it is also the turn-of-phrase in conversation about this film that Tokyo Sonata is still an odd and offbeat Kiyoshi Kurosawa concoction. Some are loving Kurosawa's fusing of his tried-and-true hyper-allegorical renderings with his more novel stab at social realism. Others think his penchant for the odd and off-kilter undermines the worldly wisdom.

In the end, the film is an uneven mix of moments of inspiration and moments of banality; moments of true power and moments of incredulity; scenes of incredible beauty and scenes of social laffs so telegraphed and run-of-the-mill you wonder when's the Kurosawa ghost gonna finally pop out. The cons listed are ultimately attributable to both the overstated social drama originally aimed for as well as the mild Kurosawa mindfuck that eventually has emerged, as the fusion is a bit awkward. When the film is working as a social drama, it spins its wheels for the most part with the broadest social observations and situations. I don't really warm to Kurosawa's sense of humor (Kurosawa's License to Live is a great dark allegory marred by his unfortunate inclination for quirk), and here it's used to drag out unfunny caricatures, most dealing with making the father as pampered as possible (e.g. his worshiping his friend's mock cell phone conversations and his prissiness as a janitor). When turned around as a super-expressionistic Kurosawa film, his oddball flourishes come off a bit hoary and reveal his writing is often dependent on the use of proliferate metaphors, not reality-based observation. When the story is as literal-minded as it is here, his love for open metaphors ("Someone please help me up," or "I've come this far" - both quotes from the mother, unsurprisingly) just seems overly vague, thrown in there without the meat of reality to support it -- which is a problem when your film has such an agenda to be more meat and less philosophy. When the surreal, expressionistic plot developments, character interactions, and abstract flourishes rear their head in the latter half of the picture, their abruptness made them a cliche of the Kurosawa kind. Of course, the "Kiyoshi Kurosawa cliche" is a very special type of cliche, but, even if it were not for the contrast between hyper-realism and hyper-allegory found here, the absurdist gestures of Tokyo Sonata are a bit hackneyed.

The film is best when, of course, it finds the happy medium between accessible and weird. As it turns out, apparently the film's development was not entirely a harmonic one: Aussie co-writer Max Mannix had originally written the film to be a very Ozu-like, "neo-realist" look at a contemporary Japanese family, without whimsical interruptions (indeed Kurosawa had significantly re-worked it to his own vision, with such interruptions). But despite my misgivings, I am glad Kurosawa ran off with it: the feverish and dreamy climactic act is a fine reminder just how good Kurosawa is at the abstract and the ethereal.

A few more nagging flaws: a subplot with a fellow down-and-out businessman is a distraction, laying at the center of the film's "prosaic" middle-section, and its awfully premature discarding deems it ultimately useless. I had an issue with the casting as well, this character being casted in a way that I thought him much younger than our protagonist, when they were supposed to have gone to school together. This would not be so much of a problem if it didn't just serve to highlight that this depicted 2nd family (the family of the friend) functions solely as a redundant mirror of the main family, when something possibly more interesting could have been done if they mixed it up a bit, for instance if the friend actually was of a younger generation.

Second, you know that scene when the mother goes all Bonnie Parker and returns to the thief all rawr and "You know you're glad to see me, let's drive!"? Then she retracts the convertible roof and says "I've come this far"? Well, we all saw that bit coming, as crowd-pleasing as it is.  In general, the mother's third act development is perhaps too incredulous and the thief seems inessential and incongruous to the rest of the film.  His being a portrait of failure is an effective point, potently filmed, but he is a sole cartoon character in midst of steady husbands and fathers that fill the rest of the picture.

Lastly, there is another subplot involving the US military and Japan that seems more suited for the more farcical satire of something like The Host than this film. It is a bit thuddingly presented, but I appreciated the plain-spoken hypothetical nature of it. It also leads to a very clear-headed and moving final word for a pivotal character. The excellence of this particular plot thread's closure is an evaluation that probably applies to the film as a whole: despite the rough and uneven ride we are given throughout the film, the resolutions and finishing touches the film finally offers us are all of stunning clarity -- for instance, the climax being the literal dissemination of the family, and the resolution being their ironic, simultaneous coalescence to a stunned breakfast table (with a repeating angle that is reprised for each character's entrance). And then there's the final scene, which is truly resplendent in its simplicity.

Tokyo Sonata - 7/10

Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009)

This must be one of the most non-message-laden children's film I've seen; perhaps one of the most non-message-laden films, period, I've seen. Coraline is practically anomalous in the annals of above-ground cinema in its quizzical non-preachiness. The imaginative anarchy that is supposedly liberated in the animated film and alleged to be achieved in the likes of the South Park and Aqua Teen Hunger Force movies have always never been able to shake off a certain transparency in their existence as responses to the current fixtures of mainstream culture, whether doing this with explicit satire (as in South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut) or utterly vulgarized inanity (Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon The Movie). Coraline, on the other hand, reaches back to those strange fascinations humans had in their childhood, when things could be utterly meaningless and not be an acquisition from the grab bag that is popular culture's sense of irony (or from, of course, the opposite: the grab bag - or fish-in-a-barrel - of culture's stead beliefs, like moral values, religion, psychoanalysis, etc.). Coraline, with Dada-like imperceptibility, succeeds in being the first film about nothing, without a socialized, righteous bone in its body. No morals, no Christian values, no Freudian shockers, no politics, and no cultural subversion like South Park or Un Chien Andalou (although I'm told I must see Freddie Got Fingered). It's not about any traditionally boasted life values - heck, it's not even about imagination! The closest one could get is saying the film's actually not a film... it's a "moving picture." Because yessiree, that is right, these pictures move nowadays! So if you want to see bustier-clad tightroping dames, all's ya gotta do is just look through this 'ere peep'ole and turn the crank. Why are they tightroping in lingerie? Because you like it, that's why! Why else?

And that is what Coraline is about. Not all that "appreciating your family" blah blah. It's about spectacle without explanation. I suppose one could elaborate that into practically equaling "psychoanalysis," since that - the labyrinthine mind - is where all sensations are in essence from, and spectacle is by definition whatever the hell makes us sensate. What it implies about the human condition is the field of psychology, but Coraline, strikingly, doesn't seem to give a fuck.

So the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie is out there in the multiplexes waving its arms about telling viewers, "If you don't enjoy this, then you've become a closed-minded busybody!" But it's purposefully crude drawings emphasizes its irony and so betrays its status desires, its counter-cultural pandering, its riffing on video game nostalgia, and its general catering to modern pop culture's post-modernity-developed sense of meaninglessness. Coraline, on the other hand, starts from square zero. It tells the viewer: "If you don't enjoy this... were you ever unsullied by this social world?" Were you ever a child, those little beings who could be dazzled by the purely meaningless without feeling the need to respond to some intellectual registration of the object in question within themselves?

Now, which you find more appealingly "X-treeeme!" I'll gladly leave to each person's personal taste, but while ATHF calls you out for "changing, man!", Coraline is, well, aghast at your very existential being, as someone who was never born an untouched child. You didn't "used to be cool" - you just never were; you must have popped out your mom's womb the prick, moron, knucklehead, hipster, whatever, that you are now.

Okay, so maybe the film does have a story and a message. The whole film is centered around imagery and archetypal renderings of the family unit, mother-daughter dynamics, and gothic imagery, which, one can suppose, gives it message enough. The sequence of Coraline's complete immersion into the Other world, in which she sits in on the grand shows performed by her neighbors, is a visual tour de force and makes me want to give the film a 9 for its unabashed indulgence in the joys and the morbid traps of empty magic and spectacle (equated in the film to the "perfect family" ideal). Watching in such impossible close-up those creepy, beady-eyed mice doing runway acrobatics made me recall other antiquary curiosities as Edison Co.'s 1903 elephant electrocution film and this thing.
This film harkens back to the good ol' days of the Cinema of Attractions, where concerns to be narratively engaging, explicably PC and rational, and logically appeasing were not to be so stringently applied to the magic of the movies.

The 3-D is amazing. I cannot imagine watching the movie without it, although I am not sure if that fact makes me very happy. It just confuses me more about the seeming resistance to "message" behind this picture. Any themes or emotional through-points Selick might be trying to communicate through his screenplay are at least equaled, but likely surpassed, by his motivation to create a 3-D extravaganza. Coraline is an very special film in that, from pretty much every angle - that is, thematically and otherwise - it is pretty much about spectacle and empty spectacle, and the 3-D just plays so nicely into that. I am sure Coraline is almost as fine and evocative in 2-D, but I imagine the film is pretty much built around creating 3-D imagery. It's 2 hours of the Paddle Ball man from House of Wax - only thematically integrated, and dazzling, and not idiotic.

So is it Selick being texturally perceptive in that he has made a 3-D spectacle of a film, about the perils of empty spectacle, communicated in the way of complete spectacle, and with a shocking lack in conventional movie preachiness, which would have undermined the spectacle? That would be some fine subtext, if it be the case. Assuming so, what does it say about a film that makes it its anti-moralistic prerogative not to undermine its devious motives to beguile and seduce its audience with egregious spectacle, without taking the audience to task at the end?

The film's spectacle targets a special, weird place in its susceptible viewers' hearts and minds, which is the same sensibility that in other cases causes us to be so strongly pulled in by the sheer strange, and so bemused by the non-sequitur. The non-sequitur, as in those funny things that have a way of revealing the meaning behind meaninglessness. Is that not what symbology and dream psychology essentially is? The meaning behind the meaningless (or the meaning given to the meaningless...?). Take for example, the Other Father, cultivating a garden in the form of her likeness - is the concept just "cool" or was it culled from some Jungian notion of something-or-other, who knows what, about seeds being sown or the blossoming of fruit? Does the distinction really exist? Most likely it is both, and thus we get to the idea that Coraline is a synthesis of cinema and dreams - dreams being spectacles, but an intrinstic part of the real world, the real world being that place where it is, after all, all 3-D, all the time.

And one's dreams don't exactly assault you with cloyingly pat messages after sitting with them for an hour and a half, do they?

I wonder about Neil Gaiman's book and what "morals" or messages it is most inured to impart to its readers... and how this film adapts and accentuates (or, I suspect, de-accentuates) them.

Coraline - 7/10

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2008)

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has many problems, and the description "Too straightforward" probably lies at the heart of the most pesky and prominent of those shortcomings. Without any seeming qualms with its own existence, David Fincher and Eric Roth's Benjamin Button (as opposed to F. Scott Fitzgerald's satirical short story) is a 3-hour chronicle of an unblemished everyman's life - albeit one who ages backwards - and it is as interminably story-driven and non-scandalous as it sounds. Nope, no Benjamin on "I Was a Teenage Pedophile!" specials on Maury Povich.

For one, the film is set in the first half of the twentieth century. Second, the film's idea of the American everyman is not a shallow, opportunistic yokel but the opposite - the virtuous man, graced with the dignity of humility, courage, and kindness... and, as conceived by Roth, seems to have little else to him but. Then what is there for the film to really engage an audience, made up of discerning viewers likely unwilling to accept a cipher for a screen surrogate?

The film has a wrench to throw in, using Fitzgerald's novel premise and making this everyman tale a fantastical fairy tale. Unfortunately, this fairy tale aspect constitutes a lot of what is inherently arbitrary and pointless about this film, which takes an absurd, ribbing, monkeyshine of a short story and makes it into the most earnest life-metaphor fable you can possibly imagine. What exactly does a story about a man who ages backwards have to tell us about anything, especially when the main character is, from the very get-go, automatically given such a passive predilection to the "blessing and a curse" condition he suffers and bears? In other words, why does he perceive himself as anything more than a freak of nature, a medical curiosity, maybe a victim of a curse? What exactly about his condition has freed him from the normal tendencies of a developing ego, making him seemingly insusceptible to pathological insecurity and cruelness, or narcissism and delusion? It wouldn't take too much to connect his happy lack of narcissistic or destructive impulses with his beginning his life enfeebled and thus thoroughly humbled... but, unfortunately, a study of formative psychological development hardly seems to be of concern to the film. Instead, it sweeps through much of the struggles and crises of ego formation so attributable to maturation with a cutesy voice-over passage where we see young Benjamin flexing in front of a bathroom mirror while his voice-over winks and goes, "Oh, puberty... well, you know."

So does Benjamin's condition have anything to do at all with the fact that he becomes such a gleamingly upright, perfectly bland, perfectly wholesome and virtuous young man? What about him being physically old during his developmental years saved him from becoming the troublesome teen - a thoughtless rabelrouser, a brooding sociopath, a wannabe rock star? We do not get thoughts on this from the film. The nitty-gritty of psychology and biology is far from a concern to this over-sized fable.

We are just supposed to accept the character of Benjamin Button - the perfectly-normal, good-hearted, squeaky clean male human, with a condition that doesn't make him weird, that doesn't make him psychologically aberrant... all it does is teach him exclusive life lessons and give him access to an in-many-ways privileging process of maturation: youth, for Benjamin, now no longer wasted on the young.

Is this at all realistic? The answer clearly being no, the question to follow is: how much does this film's parabolic fable have to impart on us, as relatable to our own, imperfect lives? (For instance, few get the privilege of losing their virginity free of the pressures and expectations that are had by virile youth.) Many critics argue very little. All the film seems to do is answer the following, much more confusing question: What do piano playing old women, Armistice periods, cruel war, blacks in New Orleans, sexual blossoming, hotel love affairs, and the dilemmas of backwards-aging fathers have in common? Answer: Either, again, very little, or some vague amalgam of too much for the proverbial plate, even a big-budget, 3-hour one. This amalgam Roth creates is of broad, doting ruminations on time and mortality, themes told to us with much more efficiency in the likes of Groundhog's Day. And my last rhetorical question, I promise, that I must pose to this movie: what the hell do buttons have to do with anything?

The film is schematically determined to arbitrarily document a man's entire life, from run-ins with button moguls to motorcycling across the world, all without the desire to betray Benjamin's character function as a total blank slate - not a real personality, per say, but merely a living metonymy for the emotional edification garnered from the everyman's ever-ticking temporal experience. It's a kitschy metaphor film to its very bones, and it is often criticisms of its platitudinous innocuousness that is leveled at the film by haranguers. But if there is any reason I think mostly positively about this dull block of cinematic wood, so logistically conceived upon ideas of bewilderingly uninteresting impracticality, it would be from an ambiguous, perceived-but-likely-not-entirely-there tone of philosophical subversion, ironically conceived upon the opposite of guileless impracticality: notions of earthy practicality, at their most self-involved and self-gratifying. The critics may be saying Benjamin and his great loves don't deserve a movie, but the film's promotion of sensual fulfillment works to validate all its rapturous excess: Ben was a beautiful man with a beautiful (if barely interesting) life, and just as he lived it, he deserves to re-live it, as does he deserve the most romantic and sumptuous and sizable biopic Hollywood can give him. Take part in the rapturous joy of his wholesome romance with life and the common-man affirmation it provides... or don't, and you're missing out.

The film presents an overriding conviction towards the "Take advantage of every moment" platitudes it gives out, to the extent that a major motif of the film seems to be a championing of a sort of selfishness and self-centered revivification that's found in the pride and joy of the bodily; the bodily resplendent, the bodily sensual; the youthful, the radiant, the life-affirming in the purely sensory of pleasures. The film, in retrospect, can be read as emphatically anti-intellectual - nary is a "thinker" to be seen, only "feelers" and "livers." Every moment of affirmation in the film has to do with a sort of reverie separate from any social or intellectual perception. Every character is a "common" person, totally invested in seizing the moment with activities of only physically exhilarating of sorts. Mr. Button finds happiness in a sunset, the Tugboat Captain in - not the tatts themselves - but showing off his tatts. The film's two artists - Daisy and the tugboat Captain - are not artists intellectually and creatively, but artists of the bodily sort. The film often illustrates the somewhat selfish nature of living our common life to its fullest. Mr. Button, knowing his life is in its December years, plunges into a relationship with Benjamin knowing full well the volatility of such a situation. Daisy makes her daughter read her Benjamin's diary even though the daughter is clearly uncomfortable with and soon downright upsetted by it, just so she could get the satisfaction of re-living her saucy youth. This idea of the film promoting "selfishness" - under the idea that who you take from is willingly sacrificing for you, in a generosity borne from understanding - to achieve life's true fulfillment is prominent in the film. Benjamin as well as Daisy's daughter are not exactly receiving much of anything but emotional hurt from their parents, but they dutifully perform acts for them out of obligation, for they are young while their father and mother, respectively, are nearing the end of the life which Time has allotted to them. The film is very much about the give-and-take one must perform with understanding underneath the regime of Time, in order to make one's life most fulfilling. When Benjamin and Daisy's daughter themselves are old, they will hope their own beloved will perform the give-and-take that Benjamin performed with Daisy when she neglected him in New York, or vice versa when Benjamin spurned Daisy's advances in New Orleans.

The film rewards Daisy and Benjamin's decisions to reject the other in their respective early meetings. It gives their rejections of each other justifications of a cosmic and spiritual value and validity. It is in both their knowing sense of their self - their knowing where they are (both emotionally and physically) in their life (determined by the aging process) - that allows them to stall and finally, in their third meeting, to fulfill the full gratification of Time's occasional glorious gift of happy serendipity: in this case, their "meeting in the middle" and the perfection of its momentousness, as that which Time and the processes of aging allows the two lovers. And the aforementioned rejections are of the wholesome sort, of that "spiritual validity" mentioned. Clearly not involved are various particular - and particularly "non-everyman" - problems of neurotic horniness or repressed sexuality. They are both sexual beings by the time they first meet as adults, so the sparks that fly between them are true sparks and not some sort of arrested psychology. Thus, their rejections and the rejectee's eventual moving-on from the rejection appear in the film as a sign of a cosmic wisdom privileging their meant-to-be love connection - a give-and-take between the two that results in their ultimate finding each other at the best mutual time for both. Their wisdom entails an awareness of Time, maturation, and what those factors will and will not allow us of physical and emotional pleasures (but not intellectual [nor unorthodox, queer, alternative, etc.] natch): essentially what this film is all about.

This angle will be shown to take on more problematic implications in this film's regard for history. The film deigns finding happiness and fulfillment is inextricable from a self-involvement and selfishness which is justified through love and understanding. This, in regards to Benjamin and Daisy finding fulfillment in their love, also includes taking from history by completely detaching oneself from it. They give back to history only the fact of their insignificance in it. The 60s are glazed over with a love montage, Benjamin and Daisy at the height of their happiness, seen making love and building a home with complete fulfillment - but at the expense of the turmoil and unrest that occurs in the world around them, which they (and we) should really be seeing.

So with this sort of hedonistic sensibility in the film, it seems as fallout we get the sort of wispy nothingness with which the film presents history. Despite the prominence of a mixed race environment in New Orleans in the first half of the film, the Civil Rights movement is no where to be seen. The film does promotes the role of the common man as fellow "sufferers" of the social world, but never gives any evidence or consideration to the everyman as activist / participant. We see Benjamin travel the world, we watch him witness and partake in the modest life of poorer nations - but he never becomes a hippie. Same with Daisy, who milks to the last drop the abilities of her body as a dancer, all the while picnicking with Benjamin by Cape Canaveral but probably not wondering about the Cuban Missile Crisis looming in the near future. They are both presented as perfectly contented (and perfectly justified to be contented) happy sensualists. The film presents no need to worry about "other stuff," as Daisy and Benjamin are (and, Fincher and Roth hope the audience thinks, we are) "everypeople" and not responsible to it.

This is a possible justification I can come up with for the film's fairy tale rollick through the 20th century. This, though, is probably what, if anything, would make the film's use of Katrina problematic. The film implies this No Country for Old Men-like contrast between "back then" (that which is romanticized and narrated by Brad Pitt in nonchalant diary recollection) and "now" (sickness, chaos, taking down the clock, that which takes place in a New Orleans hospital)... but if "back then" managed to "manage itself" while Ben and Daisy frolicked about, what can the film be kind of implying with its intimation of death and disease in the near future - the sort of violent death and disease which the characters in the flashback part of the film seem so immune to? Everyone dies of natural causes "back then," it seems. Even in the submarine scene, the crew's death is but the men's humble, elegiac submersion into the mysteries of the sea and the elegiac depths of war. Where is violent death in Benjamin's time? Further, where is corruption and McCarthyism? Vietnam? If the film is such a detailing of this man's life, why not Benjamin reading about Watergate in a newspaper? With the Katrina framing device, we are hinted at a city's ordeal of physical and societal decay, as well as the negligence of government organization. Is the film telling us virtuous and kind, humble and giving everymen and everywomen that we deserve the pursuit of our happiness, excusing us of any engagement in the social and political? With the possible exception of justified war, as in Benjamin's excursion to a life at sea? The ending is so effective because Daisy serves as stand-in for the last "peaceful death" before the film implies modernity will shake things up a bit, with an unseen dollop of human ugliness and institutional malignancy we have not seen an inkling of in the three-hours prior.

Ideological confusions aside, the Katrina framing device is effective. I felt its use was - superficially - very respectful, unsensationalized, and elegiac. What ultimately makes this very sentimental film work is the fact that Fincher is a deft and idiosyncratic director, and if a director is deft and idiosyncratic (as opposed to arbitrary and sentimental, which would have killed this film), I think it usually will always shine through in their films, even with such mediocre material to work with as Button.

One last capper-rant (of a literally rantish nature): I've read a number of reviews calling the adoptive mother character a "mammy"-type character, which I find a bit off-base and rather wrong-headed. I thought the mother character was presented with intelligence and particularized agency (such as in her keeping the baby and the companionship of her lover, despite his displeasure), and no more one-dimensional than every single character in the whole film. It seems like reviewers making backhand comments about the film's characterization of this one character is not appealing against stereotypes, but instead reducing every black female character with some particular set of characteristics to some perceived stereotype to begin with. It in fact reveals a hang-up on the part of the criticizer, the hang-up being a sort of egregiously narrow, limited, maybe non-existent consideration of the sheer range and individuation which is, naturally, possible and so should be allowed to black female characters?

'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' - 7/10

Images from the 1st Half of DEATH PROOF

This movie is so tender it hurts, and I mean it. This film has incredible tenderness contained in it, perhaps unrivaled in any comparable film. These choice images by themselves, of course, don't do justice to the bittersweet reel of this film's staggeringly compassionate whirl and rotation.

The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977)

Very much an art movie, but nevertheless also exciting, funny, and lively. Primordial and unevolved elements of the cinematic buddy comedy show up here and work in amusing juxtaposition with the bleak precision of the film's Christ allegory.

The character of Sotnikov is brilliantly conceived. He takes on the Christ role not because he is, as was the Son of God, the pro-actively saintly or most undeniably purposed of mortal man, but because he is the most passively meek and mildest of hypochondriac man - one who responds with willing credulity to his compatriot politics instead of transcending them; one who enjoys the balm of resignation, who relaxes himself by diminishing his consciousness to a pin-prick of perception and thus reminding himself how ephemeral and involuntary his existence is; one who becomes a martyr because it seems the best way to fit in the war-torn world he inhabits. And the film entreats the question, if the real J.C. did all the courageous stuff he did, just hoping to impress someone?

The Ascent - 9/10