The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2021: The Milky Way (1969), directed by Luis Buñuel

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune - "Under the Milky Way" by The Church

       If we consider Alejandro Jodorowsky surface level ‘weird surrealist filmmaker’, then the next step deeper would be Luis Buñuel. Debuting in 1929 with the infamous silent short film Un Chien Andalou and working all the way up until the late 70’s (primarily in Mexico but also Spain, France and Italy), Buñuel built his career on challenging society’s views on sex, religion, politics, surrealistically or otherwise. A very successful career I might add at least from a critical standpoint; He’s won the Oscar, the Palm d’Or, the Ariel, the Cesar, and dozens of other nominations and so on. In terms of critical acclaim he’s actually more successful than Jodorowsky, but then Buñuel never had a documentary about not making Dune or had Moebius draw his comic books, so in terms of pop culture he’s a nobody.

        Not to throw shade at Jodorowsky, he’s cool.

       Buñuel has been on my radar for quite some time, and originally this spot was taken by one of his most famous films, 1961’s Viridiana. When it came time for the review though, I just didn’t feel like getting into something too heavy. So instead I’ll cover one of his least decorated films, as a compromise. I mean if the Berlin International Film Festival likes you, that must mean something. Let’s see if it does.

       Released in 1969, The Milky Way was directed by Luis Buñuel, written by Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carriere and produced by Serge Silberman, a collaborative effort between France, Italy and West Germany. Paul Frankeur and Laurent Terzieff star as Pierre and Jean, two vagabonds who are hitchhiking their way to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the burial place of St. James and a popular pilgrimage destination since the Middle Ages. Along the way they visit many strange places and come across stranger people, all of whom have their own opinions of Christianity and its various aspects and that their vision is the correct one. What is true and what is false? What is reality and what is fiction?? All these questions and more will not be answered on this journey!

       If you read the wikipedia article for this film, one of the first things it’ll tell you is that it’s based on picaresque novels, a literary subgenre originating in feudal Spain which centered around the adventures of lower class people in a corrupt society. Which based on my viewing is accurate; Pierre and Jean are vagabonds and the world which they move through is not exactly clean. Filtered through the camera of Buñuel however, time and space quickly deteriorated. Pierre and Jean will start a scene in the modern day, walk into a medieval Spanish village and then come back to the present at the end. Some actors play multiple roles, scenes will have characters wearing modern and period clothing in period settings, and sometimes the movie abandons our protagonists entirely to focus on some other characters. It’s one long cinematic fever dream, as is surrealist tradition, and like the audience our two cosmic hobos are just moving along and experiencing it.

        The picaresque style is there to facilitate the main thrust of the film, which is an examination of Christianity, particularly Catholicism. Just about every character that Pierre and Jean come across is representative of some philosophical school of thought relating in some way to Christianity, Jesuits, Jansenism, even the Marquis de Sade pops in there at one point, and their conversations and debates are lifted straight from their writings. If you’re anything like me much of this will go over your head because you don’t have much knowledge or interest in the development of Christian theological writing, but given his history with the subject perhaps that is Buñuel’s point; That it’s all just people more interested in intellectual masturbation than emulating Jesus. None of it has much of a bearing on the lives of regular people, represented here by Pierre and Jean, who are more interested in where their next meal is than theological debates, and are often ignored or treated with derision by these Christly scholars. Even Jesus himself doesn’t come across as all that great, which is perhaps for the best. An imperfect symbol of an imperfect religion.

       If you’re not tickled by this deconstruction of Christian theology though, the film loses a lot of its appeal. It’s strange certainly, absurd even, but it’s a very mellow strangeness. Compared to the psychosexual intensity one can find in a Jodorowsky or Lynch film it’s positively lethargic. Pierre and Jean aren’t the most engaging characters ever written, which makes sense as they’re mainly passive observers, and the rest of the characters are mainly mouthpieces through which the thrust of the satire is delivered with the occasional gag on the side, so there’s no one to really latch onto. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happens, as Homer Simpson once said, and you continue watching less to see if Pierre and Jean ever actually make it to Santiago de Compostela  and more to see the circuitous path of the narrative. Less ‘It's more about the journey than the destination” and more of a morbid curiosity.

So The Milky Way is a film divided into two; As a piece of art, I found it to be a well researched and well written piece of surrealist social satire. As entertainment however, as a story that is meant to connect with the audience, I found it to be cold, maybe even dull if I were in a bad mood. I think that’ll be the main factor in your enjoyment here, figuring out how you balance those two aspects. I didn’t hate the film though, and on a technical level, acting, cinematography etc. it’s solid, so The Milky Way gets a mild recommendation. Try it out, although you might want to avoid inviting your Christian friends over for a viewing. Unless they’re Protestants I guess, but they might enjoy it for the wrong reasons.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), directed by Peter Hunt

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Cross Country Skiing", by Heidecker and Wood

       I might have mentioned it before, but I’m not exactly the biggest James Bond fan in the world. Even before I found the idea of glorifying state-sponsored murder rather distasteful, there was always something about the franchise that I found very manufactured. That Bond always had to have the fancy cars and suits, that women had to throw themselves at him at every opportunity, it all seemed rather dull to me. Laughable even, although growing up in Austin Powers might have helped that along a bit.  That James Bond was the pinnacle of manliness, the ideal male power fantasy, ultimately seemed embarrassing to me because it apparently meant that men peaked at 14 years old. Might as have the next Bond film be about 007 arguing about pewdiepie in a youtube video comment section and finally complete the cycle. Theme song by Beyonce.

Way back near the dawn of this blog I actually covered another Bond film, 1987’s The Living Daylights, starring Timothy Dalton. A rather unfortunate fate, those Dalton-Bond era films; An attempt at a darker, more serious take on the character in reaction to the goofier Roger Moore era films that was abandoned after two films for the slightly less goofy Pierce Brosnan era, and sort of forgotten afterwards. Arguably not the fate they deserve, although I recall Daylights as being rather dry, but at the end of that review I mentioned that one day I would be covering a movie that some people might wish they could forget. The black sheep of the franchise, aside from all those other shitty ones of course. I’m talking, of course, about On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

While out on his regular international jaunt, secret agent James Bond ends up saving the life of a strange, beautiful woman who is trying to drown herself at sea. The woman as it turns out is the Contessa Theresa Di Vincenzo, the strong-willed daughter of Draco Di Vincenzo, local industry magnate/crime boss. Draco’s idea of helping his daughter’s sense of well-being is paying some dude she just met to have sex with her, and having sex with women he barely knows is Bond’s whole thing. More importantly though, 007 is looking for information on the location of one Ernst Stavro Blofeld, international criminal mastermind and known lover of white cats. Blofeld has been in hiding for a while now, but the rumblings through the underworld seem to place him getting some shenanigans in Switzerland. Shenanigans which, if successful, could spell the end for millions of lives and the global economy. Which probably isn’t good, so it’s up to James Bond to save the day in his very special way.

So let’s start with the elephant in the room: James Bond himself. After Sean Connery decided to depart the series, the powers-that-be decided to bring in former model George Lazenby to fill the role. Not a bad idea necessarily -- While he didn’t have Connery’s rugged charisma, Lazenby literally had the skills to pay the bills in the looks department, and his youthful energy (Lazenby was only 29 when this movie came out) meant that he had the physicality for the role. The money they could potentially save by slotting in a young fresh replacement for Connery in their franchise and low balling him on the contract likely also had a hand in the decision.   

Then he decides to talk.

Now you could pin the blame on inexperience (this was Lazenby’s debut film), or the fact that we was segregated from the rest of the cast during filming, leading to some onscreen and offscreen tension between him and the cast, but the fact is the moment he opens his mouth all that charisma fades away. The man has an astounding lack of range, it’s as if they had someone run through the entire film and physically mix his audio to be as passive as possible. Good enough, but still not great, when Lazenby needs to put on the Bond charm, but when he needs to have some emotional range (which this script explicitly calls for) it’s like you’re transported back to a high school drama class. When  you’ve got not only the series regulars but actors like Diana Rigg and Telly Savalas, Lazenby seems almost a second wheel in his own damn movie. He’s James Bond sure, he does all the James Bond things, but through every action sequence and every one liner you get the sense that there should be an asterisk every time his name pops up in the script. I’d almost feel bad for him if he wasn’t a millionaire actor/former model.

       Speaking of Mr. Kojak, I have to say that Blofeld might be my favorite character in the film. Clearly evil, clearly the villain, performed in a very calm, understated way. You can see why they decided to base their design of Lex Luthor on Savalas when they were working on Superman: The Animated Series. You could totally believe that this dude is bad enough and smart enough to pose a threat to the Man of Steel. That we never got Telly Savalas as Luthor in the Superman films is actually a bit of a shame, now that I've finally seen him as Blofeld.

I’m also not a huge fan of how the story is structured. The film is over two hours long in total, the first hour being dedicated to the Bond/Tracy relationship, and the second to Blofeld’s virus plot, eventually crossing by the end. It works, in the same way that a rock works as a hammer, but at the same time the two plots feel very disconnected from each other. That Tracy just so happens to be Draco’s daughter, who just so happens to be the one person who can point out the whereabouts of Blofeld seems a bit convenient even for a dumb action movie, as is Tracy’s deus ex machina return to the plot near the end, which seems to only exist in order to remind us that she still exists. Even though the last hour of the movie you just watched didn’t even acknowledge her existence until that moment and had Bond do his normal banging random women routine, and that we’re basing a ‘one true love’ relationship on about two weeks and a montage. It feels like you need more development on the romance but it’s the Blofeld section that the audience came to see, so you’ve got the odd situation of a two and a half hour movie feeling cramped and rushed at the same time.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service does find time to squeeze in some old fashioned racism and misogyny though. Whether it’s having the only Black woman in the film eating a dinner consisting solely of bananas, or Tracy’s father basically stating that she needs to get over the death of her mother by being fucked into submissiveness (and of course both he and Bond get a chance to sucker punch her), it’s just enough to remind you that the 007 franchise has always been pretty lame. That Tracy gets one scene where barely manages to fend off a single guard doesn’t really change much. And yeah, it being ‘a different time’ doesn’t either.

If there’s one thing I’ll give the movie though, it’s in its setting. Portugal looks okay, but once the film transitions to Switzerland it gets downright lovely. The filmmakers knew it too, because we get a whole bunch of snow-related stuff. Aerial shots of the Alps, open vistas, the  skiing scenes (which feel about three hours long) and for some reason a fight scene that takes place in a bobsled. No one ever seems all that cold, despite things like being buried under snow for minutes at a time, but I guess it wouldn’t be the ultimate male power fantasy if 007’s dick fell off from frostbite. I’m not even remotely interested in skiing and it made me want to visit the Swiss Alps, which was probably the point. Even if Bond fans weren’t happy with this movie, I’m sure the Swiss Tourism Bureau was.

Lastly, the music. Not much to say on that front, except that for some reason it seems like they added a synthesizer or some kind of electric organ to the Bond theme. It ended up making it sound tinny and rather unpleasant to the ears, but it only really comes up during the beginning and the ending so it’s forgivable. Not sure why you would even want to mess around with one of the most recognizable pieces of music in Western cinema, to be honest, seems like an unnecessary risk. Just give the audience the horns and shit and you’re golden.

On Her Majesty’s Service has an easy enough story and decent action, but given what they were aiming for, the new face of the franchise, an attempt at pathos, it falls short of expectations. Certainly watchable, it’s not the worst movie I’ve ever seen by a long shot, but at the same time I’m no more a Bond fan after watching it as when I started. Give it a shot if you’re feeling so inclined, but it’s not really a priority viewing. 

James Bond Will Return 

In

Never Say Never Again

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016 -- The Cremator (1969), directed by Juraj Herz

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Cremation", by King Diamond

     Now I can’t say for certain, having no experience in the matter, but I’m betting living in a Soviet satellite nation was pretty rough. Standing in line for bread, the systematic erasure of your own native culture, the persistent looming threat of secret police stealing you away in the night so you can work in a prison camp, you’ve heard it all before. Even if those kinds of things didn’t happen as often as we might think it did, and considering the vendetta America had against all things red it wouldn’t all that surprising, the fact that it did happen to any degree was still a miserable thing to have to live with. Living from day to day, listening to Piknik records on cassette cape, wondering if this was the time that your government was going to go Saturday morning cartoon villain on your ass, it couldn’t have been an easy life.

     The film world did get a bunch of good movies out of it though. Hell, in some ways the art of filmmaking was a much easier experience than it was in the Free West, with the whole desperate search for investors, the subjugation of your creative vision to corporate interests, etc. Sure, if you wanted to make a movie in Poland you couldn’t include a scene where the protagonist farted on Kruschev’s borscht, but if you wanted to make a movie all you really had to do was send off a proposal to the local arts office. And they would just send you money to make a movie, just like that. Better yet, if you wanted to make a movie criticizing an oppressive and hateful government without getting censored by said oppressive and hateful government, all you had to do was set the movie during World War II, back when most of eastern Europe was under control of Hitler’s Germany at the time. I mean, who doesn’t hate Nazis?

     #insertTrumphere

     Case in point: The Cremator, a Czech film directed by Juraj Herz in 1969. Set in Czechoslovakia in the months leading up to the Nazi occupation of the country (and the onset of World War II), the film centers around a man named Karl Kopfrkingl, who works at the local crematorium in an unnamed (as far as I remember) Czech town. Karl is a simple man, if rather long-winded and opinionated about how great cremation is, with a loving family and the respect of his friends and employers. However, as the German army marches on Prague and the Nazi idea becomes more pervasive, Karl finds himself taken in by the empty pleasures and the philosophy of hatred and misguided superiority that the Nazi Party provides. Soon what began as a mere love for cremation becomes an obsession, and Karl craves more and more power to more easily shape the world according to his desires. And he’s damn sure something like his wife’s Jewish blood keep him from his dreams. Even if he has to get a little… serious.

     Unfortunately, The Cremator never lets you forget that this guy is big on cremation. Karl is constantly going on about death and how much he loves cremation, and by ‘constantly’ I mean it’s about 90% of his dialogue and that he talks almost nonstop throughout the film. I get that it’s a good way to show how up his own ass he is about cremation, but it also kind of marks how the plot will work itself out before you ever get into it. I mean, it’s movie set at the beginning of World War II and your protagonist is a guy who slips into the Nazi kool aid like a duck through water and thinks that it would be totally great if people burned alive (he says almost exactly that in the film), and apparently his family are too stupid to realize their dad talking about burning corpses during dinner is fucking creepy. The way you see Karl’s character slowly degrade is rather well done, but there’s also little doubt where things are heading. Hell, you might as well give him a mask and have him fight Batman. He’s already got the name for it.

     On a more positive note, I really like the way Herz sets up his shots in this film. The bath scene with Karl and his wife, the walk through the cemetery, the final scene, I really like how those scenes play out. Most of that has to do with Karl, I think, who keeps this neutral expression and hushed voice almost throughout the entire film, whether he’s listening to his housekeeper crushing carp heads or ratting out his friends and family to the brownshirts. That he manages to remain so disconnected with the vile things he does really helps to enhance his ever-expanding megalomania, and the fact that he really the only one of his family to really talk at all (which might be another example of his fixation on himself and his own importance) really helps the film nosedive into surreality by the end. I still think his constant talking distracts you from getting into the world proper, you end up feeling like you’re waiting for things to happen sometimes, but the end of the journey still manages to entertain.

     If you were a fan of Malle’s and Fellini’s section in Spirits of the Dead, or if you’re a 50s/60s experimental film fan looking for something a little chilling, then The Cremator should be right up your alley. If you’re not something who tends to dig too deep when it comes to movies, tending to stick to modern styles of movie making, then you might find this a bit unpalatable. Either way, it just goes to show you that sometimes, the scariest movie monster of them all isn’t vampires or werewolves or pasty Japanese kids in wells. It’s man.

     Specifically men who are Nazis.

Easy Rider (1969), directed by Dennis Hopper

One week later. I've almost used up all my prewritten entries, so daily entries are an unlikely possibility. Doesn't seem to matter that much though.

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "The Pusher", by Steppenwolf

     The paragraph I had originally wrote to begin this entry was a lot more impassioned than I had anticipated. In that paragraph I decried the tendency in our society to reduce pieces of our culture, or counterculture in this case, into stereotypes and pastiche in order to more easily consume and dispose of it. We are so happy to listen to ‘classic’ rock and wear tye-dye shirts, but we dismiss their dreams and ideas as ‘hippie ramblings’. True, I conceded, that their goals were a bit lofty, and maybe the majority of what we call hippies were simply going with the, but couldn’t we at least acknowledge them. Do we have to so fervently dismiss every idea that we deem as strange? We may be set in our ways, and though it may feel at times that we are irrevocably bound by them, that doesn’t mean we are. It just takes a bit of effort.

     That’s what I first wrote as the opener for this entry, before I decided to erase it. Try as I might to reach a higher standard for myself, I’ve been guilty of the same consumerist behaviour I had attacked other people for. Maybe it doesn’t really matter, since so few people are going to read this anyway. Maybe all the things I’ve said up to this point don’t make any fucking sense to anyone but me. I don’t know.

     Those are the thoughts running through my mind after watching Easy Rider, that I’m viewing a culture quite similar yet foreign to my own. The film tells the story of two L.A. bikers, the introverted Captain America (Peter Fonda and the extroverted Billy (Dennis Hopper), as they travel to the East Coast in the hopes of retiring after a particularly lucrative drug deal. After being jailed for ‘parading without a permit’, they meet up with a quite drunk George Hanson (Jack Nicholson), who joins them in their mission of going to Mardi Gras, home to some of the finest whores around. A great idea, but how well can you do when everyone you meet hates your fucking guts?

     The shortest summary I’ve written so far right there. Soak it in.

     Freedom, that’s what this movie is about. The freedom to dress how you like to dress, to do what you like to do, and live how you want to live. Easy Rider makes it a point to to state that those who preach the virtues of freedom the most are the most fearful of it, and I can’t say that’s an inaccurate way of looking at it. If our heroes Captain America and Billy aren’t causing others to suffer, does it really matter if they like to smoke marijuana and ride motorcycles? We are shown very clearly that no, it doesn’t really matter at all, except to the uneducated and the authoritarian (the film takes place entirely within the South, which I doubt was unintentional). Yes, freedom is the key word here, whether you’re living in a commune in the desert or in the heart of the city. I’d keep my eyes out for the mime troupe though, if I were you.

     You can’t have a motorcycle in a movie without having someone ride it, and a significant portion of Easy Rider is dedicated to Captain America and Billy driving through the American countryside. Some truly amazing countryside, if I do say so myself. My favorite traveling scenes in the movie have to be near the beginning of the movie when they’re going through the Southwest, you take in these absolutely gorgeous red hills and clear open skies that stretch out as far as the eye can see and it makes you happy to know that this beautiful imagery is real, it has form and substance away from the painted backdrops of the Hollywood backlot. I was so intrigued by the locations used by Easy Rider that for a while I wished to visit a place like Texas or New Mexico, just to get a glimpse of that near-mythical landscape. It’s the first time I’ve genuinely wanted to go to the Southwest of my own volition, which speaks of the power of this film to provoke such a bizarre reaction.

     Coming into this film, I expected guys driving around on motorcycles, and I expected rock ‘n’ roll music. Easy Rider has motorcycles and rock music, certainly, but the overall tone of the soundtrack is much more mellow and less ‘classic rock’ than I had anticipated. Of course you have Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild”, the song so intricately connected with this movie that Dennis Hopper abruptly cuts it off before it’s even finished. Also making an appearance is the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Byrds, Roger McGuinn (former member of the Byrds), with some unknown-but-appreciated groups like the Holy Modal Rounders rounding out the cast. As someone who bathed their minds in 60’s rock music for several years I might be a little biased in saying this is a great soundtrack, but it does exactly what I want a soundtrack to do: Helping to set the tone for the scenes being presented, making average scenes more appealing, and transporting me into the world of the film. There’s much more a soundtrack than just taking cool songs and throwing them without thought into the gumbo that is the movie. In that metaphor, the film soundtrack is represented by the shrimp. Cinematography is the dirty rice.

     There’s plenty of times in my life that I’ve hungered for escape, to toss away responsibilities and to live a life of quiet comfort. That’s the appeal of Easy Rider really, that deep down we wish we could be Captain America and Billy; men who live by nobody’s rules but their own. Hell, I guess that’s what everything’s about, isn’t it? Movies, music, television, video games, art, it’s all about getting the fuck out of our own lives without actually doing it.

     The point is that I liked the movie, everything else I’ve written is tacked on bullshit.

Result: Recommended