Weekend Movie Blah Blah

Yo, muchachas and muchachos,
These are the movies I watched this weekend:
Saw Zatoichi (Takeshi Kitano) at the Arbor on Sunday and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a highly unusual samurai movie with echoes of Charlie Chaplin, Clint Eastwood, and Akira Kurosawa, with gushing fountains of blood, dry slapstick, musical numbers, a transvestite geisha, and a critique of the samurai genre that gets stranger as the movie progresses. Good stuff.
Here's what I rented:
Parsifal (Hans-Jurgen Syberberg) In my need to see every movie ever released (with the exception of most Hollywood movies from the past 20 years), I sometimes torture myself by renting a film such as this one, a four-hour filmed Wagner opera. I don't even like opera. I was pleasantly surprised, though, because Syberberg's film is visually interesting and hardly ever boring, though the last hour made me slightly irritable and impatient. Syberberg uses actors, puppets, back projection, break-apart sets, and anachronistic symbols from recent European history to get around the fact that you're basically watching a performance confined to a stage. Plus the entire set is an oversized replica of Wagner's death mask. Pretty cool, am I right?
Shane (George Stevens) I have a lot of reservations about this film. It's always aware of its own perceived importance, advocates revenge as a moral solution to a problem, spends too much time on a cute little kid, and follows the stereotypes of the classic western to a T. The bad guys wear black. The good guys wear light brown. But there's a lot to admire in the film. The acting is wonderful and rarely sentimental. There's a lot of sexual tension and ambiguity in the air. And the character of Shane is such a mystery that the film could withstand repeat viewings.
Passion (Jean-Luc Godard) I love Godard's sixties films, almost without exception. His extraordinarily difficult seventies video work gives me a headache. And I've fought with his nineties films so much, I don't know what to think of them. This is the only Godard film from the eighties I've seen, but it gives me hope that I may like some of the others. It's just as difficult as his other post-sixties films, but its touch is lighter and its subject less obscure. And it's funny and beautiful to look at.
The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese) I've been kicking around a crazy, crackpot idea for awhile that this is the first of an unofficial Scorsese trilogy, along with "After Hours" and "Bringing Out the Dead." I think these three films share similar styles and themes. All three are dark comedies; are nervous, paranoid films that owe a lot to cocaine and urban dread; and are attempts to take the ideas behind "Taxi Driver" and push them into satire.
Okay, I quit.