Part 2

Here are the other movies I watched:
A Year of the Quiet Sun (Krzysztof Zanussi) There's something lacking in this movie. I'm not sure what. The cinematography is unusual and compelling, the actors do a good job, there's nothing egregiously wrong with any of it, but it just kind of sits on the screen dully and heavily.
Time of the Gypsies (Emir Kusturica) This movie is great. It's a vaguely surreal comedy/tragedy/gangster film acted by nonprofessional gypsies (I don't mean to suggest that there are professional gypsies, I just mean they aren't professional actors and are actual gypsies) and the first movie ever filmed in the Romany language, which is spoken by only a few hundred people in the world.
A Short Film About Killing (Krzysztof Kieslowski) This is an expansion into feature length of an episode from Kieslowski's "Decalogue." The added details, mostly in the first twenty minutes, add to the mood without detracting from the power of the original cut. This is well worth your time in either version.
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles) I don't know what the hell to think. I've been interested in seeing this movie for a long time, mostly for its reputation as one of the first black-financed, black-directed, black-acted independent films and its supposed influence on most of the blaxploitation films of the seventies. Now that I've seen it, I can see how it influenced movies like "Shaft," "Cleopatra Jones," etc., but I can also see that it has more in common with independent American films from the 1950s and 1960s, French new wave, westerns, and B-grade violent thrillers and splatter movies. Unfortunately, some of it is really inept, clumsy, frustrating, and boring. Sexist, too. Ridiculously sexist. So sexist it borders on the surreally absurd. I can't completely dismiss it, though, and not just because of its historical importance. I've never seen anything like it. This is one weird, weird movie. There is nothing on this planet even vaguely approximating it, and that's something I can get behind. Parts of the film are dreadfully dull, but other moments have a weird energy and an excitement in putting something on the screen that hasn't been there before.

I saw these on the big screen:
Bukowski: Born Into This (John Dullaghan) Bukowski is slightly unfashionable in our current cultural climate. He's something you're supposed to have outgrown, like Rage Against the Machine and "A Clockwork Orange." This may have more to do with his persona (womanizing drunk with bad temper who gets in lots of fights, bets on the horses, talks about his bodily functions a lot, and sleeps in flophouses) and the zealous hero worship from knucklewalkers with literary pretensions and freshman English major fanboys (mostly getting vicarious thrills and believing that being a womanizing drunk is a worthy aspiration that somehow magically transforms you into being a writer). Is there more to Bukowski than his persona? I hoped so. I was a Bukowski fanboy in high school and the first couple of years of college. I read maybe 14 or 15 of his books, loved them, then moved on to other stuff. I've been afraid to go back because what if I have outgrown him? Why deflate something that gave me a lot of pleasure in my teen years? Why rain on my own parade? Then this documentary opened in theaters. Aha, I thought. This might be a way to rekindle my interest or put it to bed without going to the trouble of rereading one of his books. When it started, my heart sank. One person after another told a story about Bukowski getting drunk, punching a cop, waving his dick around, etc., etc. This is going to be a long two hours, I said to myself. Then, it got a lot better, even though they interviewed fucking BONO, for chrissakes, whose anecdote began, "It was a long drunken night in Italy with Sean Penn..." (At least they didn't talk to Henry Rollins. I think makers of documentaries on 20th and 21st century American cultural figures are contractually obligated to interview either Bono or Henry Rollins, no matter how tenuous their connection to the subject.) After the movie was over, I felt like reading some Bukowski. A few days later, I did. What did I think? I'm not sure. I think it's not quite as good as I experienced it initially, but it's of too much worth to be so casually dismissed by the arbiters of modern cultural taste. And, in a time when we're being McSweeneyed, Dave Eggered, Foster Wallaced, and Neal Pollacked to death, it's nice to read somebody who's not above his material, but of it.
Hyenas (Djibril Diop Mambety) This movie was shown as part of the Austin Film Society's African series. I loved it. I don't have a lot to say about this one because I don't think I've completely digested it yet, but I loved everything about it.
The Big Red One: The Reconstruction (Samuel Fuller) Samuel Fuller was a reporter, then he enlisted and fought on the front lines in WWII. He started directing movies after he returned. He made this one in 1980 based on his actual experiences in the war. The studio hacked it down and added a voice-over. Fuller died in 1997, but now film critic Richard Schickel has assembled a longer version based on Fuller's notes, his screenplay, and existing footage. It's not a director's cut (even though it's being advertised that way), some of the voice-over is still there, some footage had been lost, but it's a lot closer to the way Fuller wanted it. This is a great movie. It's also appalling how much of this movie has been stolen and watered down by Spielberg in "Saving Private Ryan." Spielberg gets showered with glory and his mediocre, dishonest, manipulative, flagwaving film is praised. Fuller, who was actually there, makes an honest, insightful, unusual, exciting film and it gets hacked up and forgotten. Maybe it's because Fuller is disinterested in heroism, only survival, and puts forth the idea that a war's survivors, regardless of which side they fought on, have more in common with each other than the people they're fighting for.