Cinematic Distractions...

[dulcedemon]

Babette's Feast(1987):
I watched this twice while I had it.
The first time, I was completely fucking smashed, and the movie was great! The reason I was completely fucking smashed had to do with a bottle of prosecco that was opened in celebration of a bad neighbor situation of six years coming to an end. Don't cry for them; they have another place to live.
The second time, I was sober, and the movie was great!
It's a sumptuous feast of profound gratitude, sexual repression, lost love, and fanatical religious devotion. If that doesn't sound like a good time, trust me, it is. This could have been a very dreary, melancholy story.
The village, which seems part normal village part religious commune, is bleak and austere. The members of the religious group(cult) all dress very plain in mostly dark colors. They eat very plain food, "bread soup" and fish soaked in milk. They eat the same thing every day. The cultists are all pretty geriatric. Even the youngest members are old.
Two of those youngsters are the daughters of the group's founder. They took his place at the head of the group after he passed away. One quickly gets a sense that they might have made different choices in life if it hadn't been for their obligations to church and family. I won't say how they would have preferred to live or where or with whom. I don't want to spoil it.
Into this dreary, cloistered scene, comes a French maid and cook, Babette Hersant(Stéphane Audran). In need of refuge from the Franco-Prussian War, she is sent to Denmark by an old acquaintance of the sisters, who implores them in a letter to let her stay with them. In return, she offers to serve as their housekeeper and cook.
The same old bread soup and milk-soaked fish suddenly tastes better. Babette lends everything a certain vibrancy. Years pass, then an unexpected windfall grants Babette the opportunity to express her gratitude to the sisters and the rest of the group.
She petitions the sisters to allow her to make an authentic French feast for the entire group to mark the occasion of an important anniversary related to the group's founding. They reluctantly give permission. Lavish banquets, lavish anything really, are not in keeping with their faith. As the feast day nears, the supplies begin to arrive, cages of fowl, a turtle, copious produce, fancy dishes and crystal goblets, and cases upon cases of the finest wine, champagne, and cognac. The sisters begin to have second thoughts, but the feast is held anyway.
Another old acquaintance of the sisters, of one sister in particular, gets himself a last minute invitation to the feast. He is a soldier, not a member of the group. He escorts his very elderly aunt to the feast.
Piety meets sensuality at the dinner table for a meal and an evening that could be described as a religious experience. Fond feelings are remembered, old grudges melt away, hearts are mended, and then, a surprise.

Loki(2021):
I liked everything about it. I liked the set design. I liked the costume design. I liked the interpersonal dynamics of the characters both major and minor. I liked the TVA retro-future aesthetic. TVA stands for Time Variance Authority, not to be confused with Tennessee Valley Authority.
I strongly recommend this, especially for those who were underwhelmed by some of the Marvel movies. The movies tend to be action, action, action, action. This series is a welcome change from that. It's distinctive, memorable, and a lot of fun.

The Bad Seed(1956):
Hysterical in every sense of the word. It has an intensity in the same vein as Mommie Dearest, and has earned similar cult status. Some say it's too over-the-top, fraught with too much scenery chewing, but I say the characters' reactions are believable and appropriate.
A mother slowly discovers the horrifying truth about her seemingly perfect little girl. Patty McCormack plays the exceedingly sweet and polite, too-good-to-be-true, somewhat spoiled little darling, Rhoda Penmark. Nancy Kelly plays Rhoda's mother, Christine Penmark. William Hopper(son of Hedda) plays Rhoda's often absent, soldier father, Col. Kenneth Penmark.
Nancy Kelly's performance here has earned a great deal of both praise and derision, even howls of laughter. She gets nothing but praise from me. Her character is somewhat neurotic, a tad frazzled, seemingly always on edge. She harbors a dark secret from her own youth. Her overall demeanor and her highly charged reactions stem from that past trauma, and the considerable effort she has made to suppress it.
When I watch her performance, she is as natural as sunlight. At the climax of the hysteria and horror, she does an intensely physical scene, which involves her repeatedly hitting her hand on a table in a particular way while reciting her lines. It's almost like her hand is keeping time for the nightmarish reality that's unfolding. It's a harrowing scene to watch. It's also the scene that gets the most laughs, which I can understand. It's such a horrifying scene that it makes the viewer want to disassociate. It makes the viewer do exactly what her character is doing by banging her hand on that table --creating a distraction from an unbearable reality. That scene for me is the real climax of the movie. The rest is simply deciding what to do about it.
Not to be upstaged is Hortense. Eileen Heckart plays Mrs. Hortense Daigle. She is the grieving mother of one of Rhoda's classmates, a boy who drowned...accidently...while on a school picnic. Hortense seeks solace at the bottom of a bottle, several bottles actually. Unable to find solace, she pays the Penmark household a few visits to ask Rhoda some questions about her little boy's last moments. She is raw, overwhelmed by grief, profoundly intoxicated, and she knows there is something fishy about her little boy's death. Eileen Heckart knocks it out of the park in both of her scenes. Frank Cady both accentuates and provides a counterpoint to her performance in his role as her quiet, apologetic husband, Henry Daigle.
Then there is Leroy(Henry Jones), who serves as the handyman/janitor of the apartment building in which the Penmark family lives. Leroy is kind of a creeper and an eavesdropper. He barges into apartments unannounced. Every moment between Leroy and Rhoda is memorable. He sees through her, and genuinely enjoys busting her ass about it. Leroy is the character that gets quoted the most by fans of this movie.
In contrast to Leroy, there is Monica(Evelyn Varden). Monica is the elderly landlord/upstairs neighbor to the Penmarks. She completely believes Rhoda's sweet little girl routine, even going so far as to buy her gifts just for being so darn adorable.
The first time I saw this movie, I was pretty young. My favorite scenes were the ones with Rhoda and Leroy. Now that I'm much older, I love Hortense. I was a little bit afraid of her when I was a kid. She is there to make everyone uncomfortable, and she does a fantastic job.
I have a complicated relationship with this movie thanks to my mother. I learned about this movie through her. Very early in my childhood, I overheard her using the title of this movie as a pejorative for me. It had a lot to do with her feelings toward my father. Short version: She was unhappy to have me, and she had convinced herself that I was destined to be "just like my father", whom she had erroneously labeled schizophrenic. After they had split when I was only two, she gossiped all over town about him. She was always eager to share her amateur psychoanalysis of him. I don't know if he had told her he was autistic. I know that he had told a few other women with whom he had been involved.
My mother had realized that I was different, and that I was different like my father. That would have been fine if she hadn't decided that what made us different was malevolent and dangerous. Thus, I was The Bad Seed.

Southern Comfort(2001):
A touching and poignant documentary of the final year in the life of Robert Eads, a transgender man diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It's an intimate portrait of Robert, his partner Lola Cola, his friends, and his family. It moved me to tears more than once.
The title refers to the Southern Comfort Transgender Conference, which has been an annual event since 1991, and features prominently in this documentary.

Vivre Sa Vie(My Life to Live - 1962):
Gorgeous black and white cinematography, and a couple of catchy tunes were the finer points for me. I could have done without Jean-Luc Godard's fetish for filming the backs people's heads while they are talking. It's stylistic but annoying.
Anna Karina plays a young woman who can't make rent on her record shop clerk paycheck. She turns to prostitution to keep a roof over her head. She is utterly clueless, and quickly gets taken advantage of by a local pimp.
She meets a young man, whom she picks up as a client in probably the most memorable scene of the film. She dances around him seductively while he tries to play pool. Gradually, they fall in love. He wants her to quit and marry him, but the pimp stands in their way.
Everything is beautiful except the story. The story is sad and infuriating. The biggest problem I had was that she and her Edgar Allan Poe reciting boyfriend didn't just leave. She is in a business that's either illegal or barely legal depending on the laws at the time. All she had to do was pack her little overnight bag and get gone. It's not like the pimp was going to call the cops. All the events that follow are a direct result of their failure to get while the getting was good.
If there isn't enough in the movie to be upset about, there is an extra feature on the DVD version in which sex workers are likened to livestock, and public urinals. It ties in well with the movie. In fact, some of it is quoted in the movie.

The Most Beautiful(Ichiban utsukushiku - 1944):
It's a propaganda film directed by Akira Kurosawa. As propaganda films I've seen go, it's well crafted, high quality stuff, but it doesn't have much of a story, and it lacks truly memorable characters.
It centers around a large group of young women who left their homes in various towns and villages of the countryside for the city to work in an optical lens factory dedicated to the war effort. They all live together in a dormitory on the factory grounds. When not working their shift, they have mandatory drum and bugle corps practice. In the mornings, they all march to the factory together, playing and singing patriotic, morale boosting songs. They'd probably get more work done if they spent less time marching and drumming, and got a few more hours of sleep instead. For occasional fun and relaxation, they play mandatory volleyball games.
There is the young woman who keeps working in spite of a broken leg, the one who tries to hide that she has tuberculosis so they won't send her home, the one who misses her own mother's funeral and later almost drops dead from exhaustion, and so forth. I don't remember any of their names. Chances are, you won't either. Maybe that's the point. The Most Beautiful makes it sound like a beauty contest, but the winning standard here is complete self-sacrifice, the stripping away of individuality, and unwavering dedication to becoming a highly efficient cog in the war machine.

Lady Street Fighter(1981):
Not to be confused with Lady Terminator, which is a terrible movie, but nowhere near as terrible as this one. This is a terrible movie. It's beyond laughably bad.
It begins with mistaken identity, which leads to the torture and murder of the titular lady's sister. That lady who fights streets is Linda Allen(Renee Harmon). She is a secret agent, sex worker, stripper, street fighter, assassin in a sparkly, sparkly dress. There is one scene in particular where she is trying to sneak around outdoors, and her evening dress is shining like a beacon. She has a partner agent, pimp, assassin, ex-boyfriend. There is a strip club. She tells her marks to meet her there, but then doesn't show.
Even though it's minor to the plot, the movie spends a lot of time in the strip club. They wrote it into the script, so they might as well use it. One time Marilyn Monroe lookalike contest winner and gangster moll, Liz Renay, performs a strip routine, which might be the only not terrible part of the entire movie.
Oh, and something about a tape that all the bad guys want hidden in a teddy bear.