Movies

How's it hanging, jerks? Here are the movies I watched over the weekend while I nursed myself back to health:
White Dog (Samuel Fuller) Some of the acting in this film is atrocious and the script is kind of spotty, but somehow this manages to be a weird, flawed masterpiece about racism, especially the American brand. Fuller's direction is sharp and ingenious, particularly in his use of color and the probing, aggressive camerawork, and the question the film asks --if you could deprogram racist tendencies, would the hatred, fear, and violence behind it shift somewhere else-- is a disturbing one.
Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator (Helen Stickler) I was never a skater, but my cousin, my brother, and a lot of my friends were. My cousin even built a few small skate ramps in my front yard (he lived in the country and no girls would see him skate out there--I lived across the street from the high school) and he and his friends launched themselves off it. I read my brother's Thrasher magazines, so I was familiar with most of the skaters in this documentary about the rise and fall of ramp skating and how its decline in popularity fucked a lot of pro skaters up, culminating in the rape and murder of an acquaintance by the subject of the film, Mark "Gator" Rogowski. It's a very well-done documentary, and that's a real achievement. Most of the skaters interviewed come across as uncharismatic, self-absorbed, boring and, in a few cases, borderline retarded, a startling contrast to their moves on the ramps. The story is compelling, though, and the old footage is great.
The Searchers (John Ford) This is a great western and a nice coincidence that I watched it on the same weekend as "White Dog." Both films have a lot to say about American racism. This is a much-written about classic, so I'll just say that it's good and leave it at that.
The House on Sorority Row (Mark Rosman) This is a complete piece of sleazy trash, a slasher movie about a killer in a sorority house, and so much goddamn fun to watch. If you want to see a severed head in a toilet and a colossally stupid actress unintentionally and hilariously mangle the line "What if she is alive," I can recommend this highly.
Identification of a Woman (Michelangelo Antonioni) I really liked this one. The scene in the fog alone makes this worth seeing, but it has many other virtues. The theme is, of course, alienation (big surprise there), but Antonioni takes it in weird new directions, implicating himself, film directors in general, art-house audiences, movie obsessives, the way men look at women and their images, and, finally, big-budget blockbusters and their audience, for contributing to a lot of human alienation and disconnect between people. And it's beautiful to look at, though there are a couple of silly, cringe-inducing moments. Alright, I'm done shooting my mouth off about that shit.