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Reviews
Equinox (1970)
"Awful! Awful!!" In a Leonard Pinth-Garnell kinda way
"Equinox" is so exquisitely crap-tacular, I have to give it such a high rating. This film really enters the heights that "Plan 9 from Outer Space" rules, and possibly surpasses that legendary Ed Wood opus. It doesn't just fail magnificently, but does so in SO many ways.
Where else will you find such deliciously bad dialog, very poorly looped (I'm sure more than half of the dialog was looped - where the dialog wasn't able to be recorded live and had to be dubbed in later, not always by the same person), the worst stop-motion animation on film (was it Claymation?!), stock background music thoroughly misused for their scenes (although the opening theme is way cool), and the most amazing eyebrows ever created for a movie (at least I hope they were fake, for the sake of the writer/director/star - we're talking Brezhnev with eyebrow mousse here).
AND it features a young Herb Tarlek!
But "Equinox" does deserve its props. Sam Raimi pretty much lifted the plot for "Evil Dead" from this movie. (To much better effect, of course, but still...)
And writer/director/star Jack Woods comes up with some clever solutions to shooting difficult scenes. For one scene, where the cast is running through some spooky old caverns, Woods must have thought: "How can we film that? No way can I shoot in the caverns, it'd be impossible to get the light right." Woods solution: show a pitch black picture, with the occasional torch moving across it. Brilliant!
There's also a bit where the two male leads have to climb up a steep, almost vertical hill, in order to look for an invisible castle. (Don't ask.) Hey, your boy Herb Tarlek is a manly man, but he ain't climbin' no rock face for you, Jackie boy.
So... he has them stoop over on a horizontal section of a trail, and turns the camera so that it looks like they're climbing a steep hill! (I half expected to see Adam West and Burt Ward to pop their heads out of gopher holes.)
There were so many times I laughed out loud while viewing "Equinox" that I absolutely recommend it to discernible viewers of unique film landmarks.
As Leonard Pinth-Garnell would say, "Awful! Awful! Truly bad! Really bit the BIG one!!"
Masked and Anonymous (2003)
unique and brilliant
There is no other movie like "Masked and Anonymous" - and a lot of people would tell you that that's a good thing.
There's no denying that "Masked and Anonymous" is not for every taste, and there are qualities about it that would certainly be very off-putting for many, if not most, film viewers. But its utter uniqueness speaks volumes to me. (If you're familiar with salon.com film critic Stephanie Zacharek, she loved it, and she hates most movies she reviews. Of course, many readers hate her reviews for that very reason.) Although there is a plot to the movie, I think it's best appreciated as a collection of individual amazing scenes: Giovanni Ribisi's back-of-the-bus monologue about his experience as a "freedom fighter"; Val Kilmer's over-the-top "religious figure" (for want of a better description); Jessica Lange's subtle masturbation scene; the meetings with the TV network executives (the network having been taken over by a Black Panther-like revolutionary group - or ARE they revolutionaries?); and most anything with John Goodman in it. And this movie has more great lines of dialog than anything since "Casablanca." The images of a future America as a third-world country, in the midst of a revolution and ruled by a banana republic-style dictator are haunting (and if you ask me, a little too close to home these days).
Oh - and the music is incredible.
Nattvardsgästerna (1963)
perfect
possibly my absolute favorite Bergman film. Gorgeous, the way a fresh blanket of snow on a frigidly cold winter night is.
Brutally bleak, "Winter Light" may be about losing religious faith, but I don't think you have to have a religious faith to identity with Gunnar Bjornstrand's character, the pastor of a small town. His "faith" is as much a will to live as anything else.
Bjornstrand and Ingrid Thulin are amazingly good, and Max von Sydow does more with a few subtle expressions, and very little dialog, than most any actor is capable of.
Not a film to watch in the dead of winter if you suffer from SAD, unless you're like me and get a perverse type of therapy from confronting the hopelessness head first.
Tystnaden (1963)
what city did this take place in?
Peter Cowie, in his short discussion on the Criterion disk of "The Silence," calls it an unidentified city, and it's true that the city is never identified by name. But the newspaper in the café scene is clearly readable - someone with better knowledge of languages than me, can you please identify? (I'm guessing East European, especially with the tanks and so forth.) As for religion (since religion/faith is really the unifying theme of the "trilogy"), what I noticed in "The Silence" is that religion is not present in ANY way; there is no discussion of faith, like in "Winter Light" (still my favorite of the three, and probably my favorite Bergman film). These characters seem to have lost any form of spirituality or faith. Indeed, the only reference to any trappings of religion was when Anna described meeting a strange man, ducking into a church with him, and having sex in a dark corner there.
If "Winter Light" concerned Bergman's struggle to hold onto his religious faith in the face of "God's silence," then I'd say "The Silence" shows that he has completely lost his faith, or maybe has voluntarily dispensed with it. I think that's the "silence" that the title refers to.