January Viewing

swanberg taught filmmaking, garrel expressed love, tashlin somehow managed laughter/

lewis &boetticher taught lighting &about the good ol' american dream/

sono explained family dynamics (again &again), pasolini talked about love &life (&nudity)/

depalma remade hitchcock (w/ more sex), bauer told the future (in the past)/

miyazaki warned about nature, bonello spoke of adolescence (&sexuality)/

&many others 

* Not first viewings

TIER I

The Zone

The Birth of Love 

Who's Minding the Store?* 

TIER II

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

The Canterbury Tales

The Killer is Loose

Guilty of Romance 

The Big Combo 

Arabian Nights

Himizu 

Vinyl* 

TIER III

Flight

Rampage 

Headshot

The Hole

Nausicaä*

Idiocracy*

Barbarella 

Dressed to Kill 

Anna Karenina

Castle in the Sky 

Snow on tha Bluff 

My Neighbor Totoro*

Behind Locked Doors 

Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos 

An American Werewolf in London

TIER IV

The Food of the Gods 

The Moth Diaries 

Thinner*  

TRASH

Life of Pi 

Shorts:

TIER I

Twilight of a Woman's Soul 

Black Ice* 

Mothlight* 

TIER II

L'imprudence 

Aidez l'Espagne 

Premios Nacionales 

Where the Boys Are 

No compteu amb els dits 

Window Water Baby Moving*

Hapax Legomena III: Critical Mass 

The Lost (& last) Pasolini Interview

Read entire interview here

This interview took place three days before Pasolini was murdered in 1975 and was just recently discovered and published (December). It's a wonderful, and short, read in which Pasolini talks passionately about the destruction that consumerism is causing in Italy. Some that is obviously present in Salò. This interview works as a great companionship to the film. Especially to anyone disregarding as pure dementia, shock value, etc. Both the interview and the film express his extreme, almost religious, dislike of what consumerism is doing to Catholics, Marxists, and all of Italy (one could say everywhere now).

About Salò:

In this new film, sex is nothing but an allegory of the commodification of bodies at the hands of power. I think that consumerism manipulates and violates bodies as much as Nazism did. My film represents this sinister coincidence between Nazism and consumerism. Well, I don't know if audiences will grasp this since the film presents itself in rather enigmatic way, almost like a miracle play, where the sacred word retains its Latin meaning of "cursed."

About consumerism:

I consider consumerism a worse fascism than that the classical one, because clerical-fascism did not transform Italians. It did not get into them. It was totalitarian but not totalizing. I'll give you an example: fascism has tried for twenty years to eliminate dialects and it didn't succeed. Consumerism, which, on the contrary, pretends to be safeguarding dialects, is destroying them.