Aeronautic Primates and Other Delights

It was my birthday on Monday! It's also been my first birthday in a long time that didn't coincide with TGIF/F. sol_se made it all magical with a present of Rifftrax and chocolate sheet cake!

Movies I've seen before are in italics

My Bloody Valentine (1981)
The Seventh Seal (1957)
Rifftrax: Attack of the Super Monsters
Wet Hot American Summer (2001)
Rifftrax Live: Summer Shorts Beach Party
20 Million Miles to Earth (1957)
Godzilla Raids Again (1955)
Rifftrax: Wonder Women

Yes, we watched My Bloody Valentine on Valentine's Day. It is not good, but for the genre, it's not bad either.

I leveraged my birthday to make sol_se watch Ingmar Bergman. It occurred to me halfway through that a better introduction probably would have been Wild Strawberries, but alas. Still such a good film and unexpectedly funny in places.

Attack of the Super Monsters is... amazing. It's live action monsters-in-suits, but animated people. It seems like it should be the other way around or all animated. It's very bad and very well riffed.

I love Wet Hot American Summer and I may very well rewatch the prequel series now. I still haven't seen the sequel series all the way through.

20 Million Miles to Earth is one of the original Harryhausen classics and it stands up. It's no great shakes in terms of plot or anything, but if you want stop-motion monster action, this will hit the spot.

Mom sent me a gift card for my birthday and I used it to buy Criterion's Godzilla collection, which is all Godzilla movies 1954 - 1975 in a beautiful art book. In some ways, it's a downgrade from my existing Godzilla box set, because it doesn't have many special features except on the original, but it's gorgeous and complete and I love it. We watched Godzilla Raids Again which is... fine. It doesn't really get why the original is special and the climax is super-tedious.

Wonder Women has nothing to do with Diana Prince. It's a weird action-women-sci-fi thing, filmed with absolutely no regard for human or animal life.

Hello from Ingmar Bergman-land! We're nearing the end now (just three films and one television miniseries left). Only two films this week were not directed by Ingmar Bergman (you can probably guess which ones).

Films in italics are ones I've seen previously.

Through a Glass Darkly (1961)
Winter Light (1963)
The Silence (1963)
Virgin Spring (1960)
The Seventh Seal (1957)
The Devil's Eye (1960)
All These Women (1964)
Sawdust and Tinsel (1953)
The Rite (1969)
A Hard Day's Night (1964)
The Magician (1958)
After the Rehearsal (1984)
The Touch (1971)
The Serpent's Egg (1977)
Persona (1966)
Thirst (1949)
Masters of the Universe (1987) w/sol_se 
Port of Call (1948)
Cries and Whispers (1972)

Through a Glass Darkly remains one of my favorite Bergman films, probably top five. Maybe I should do a ranking when I'm done with this box set? Most of Bergman's best films are chamber pieces with small casts working through intractable problems.

Winter Light deals directly with the question of faith, which for me is largely answered already, so it didn't have the same impact for me that it might have for others.

The Silence is difficult to watch for the best reasons.

I didn't find Virgin Spring (Bergman's first Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture) all that impressive. I spent part of the time comparing it to its ill-gotten offspring Last House on the Left. It came out favorably in the comparison, but still not among my favorite Bergman movies.

The Seventh Seal is funnier than I remember it being. I largely credit Gunnar Björnstrand (a Bergman stalwart) and Nils Poppe (apparently Sweden's Big Name in comedy) for that. It's still a harrowing depiction of doubt in the face of eternity, but there are laughs along the way.

The Devil's Eye and All These Women show, despite what Smiles of a Summer Night and, um, The Seventh Seal suggest, that Bergman has no real knack for comedy.

Sawdust and Tinsel has one really affecting sequence at the beginning, but didn't excite me otherwise.

I needed a break from Bergman, so I watched A Hard Day's Night, one of my all-time favorite movies. So delightful, so endearing, so fun!

I liked The Magician this time better than I liked it the first, but it still has points that frustrate me, given that I like some kind of ground rules to be in effect. Either there's magic or there's not and the movie is frustratingly ambivalent. I suspect that's the point, but it doesn't win me over.

Both of Bergman's English-language films, The Touch and The Serpent's Egg, are different levels of bad. I wonder if all of Bergman's male protagonists are complete louses and the Swedish language hides their sins.

Persona is so fucking good. It's my favorite Bergman movie by a long shot. Just... mm. Good good good. I don't mind the rampant ambivalence here, as the film is fairly clear on its own artifice, which doesn't detract from its reality -- if that makes any sense.

Masters of the Universe was my date movie with sol_se (changed last-minute from Shark Exorcist). Both of us saw the film as youths, but neither of us remembered it very well. It's not terribly good. They had a rich fantasy world to potentially pull from and decided to set most of the movie in suburbia via magic portals. C'mon now.

Bergman didn't do a lot of work in color, which is a shame, because Cries and Whispers shows a certain mastery of color-for-storytelling. It's a riveting, sometimes upsetting film.

In case you're curious, I skipped The Magic Flute, because I saw it back in July on Criterion Channel. If it wasn't 2.5 hours, I might have watched it again, though, because I'm very fond of it.

This week's list is somewhat taken over by the fact that I acquired Criterion Collection's 39-film Ingmar Bergman set, so I've been watching that a lot.

Titles in italics I have seen previously.

Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
The Exterminating Angel (1962)
The Tale of Zatoichi (1962)
Wages of Fear (1953)
Eagle Shooting Heroes (1993)
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)
Crisis (1946)
A Ship to India (1947)
Wild Strawberries (1957)
To Joy (1950)
Summer Interlude (1951)
Summer with Monika (1953)
Mirror, Mirror 2: Raven Dance (1994) (w/ sol_se )
The Lion King (2019) (w/ elipie and company)

Elevator to the Gallows was a fine French noir, the first film by Louis Malle if I understand correctly. It does a thing I greatly enjoy, which is put a lot of pressure on bad people, so you're caught between wanting them to get away with it and wanting to see them get their just desserts.

The Exterminating Angel is a goddamn masterpiece by Luis Buñuel. The very rich go to a dinner party and find they can't leave. The breakdown of social order ensues. I loved it.

The Tale of Zatoichi is the first film in a 26-film series about a blind masseuse-turned-swordsman (take that MCU). Criterion Channel has the first 25. I may or may not work my way through them. Tale was a perfectly serviceable film about criminal dealings and honor and all of that.

Wages of Fear was very good, although not the pulse-pounder I was lead to believe. Maybe if I saw it in a theater? Still, excellent storytelling and an exciting plot. 

Eagle Shooting Heroes is a ridiculous parody of kung fu and wuxia. Although I was a little iffy on its sexuality politics, it was overall enjoyable and elicited more hearty guffaws out of me than most comedies do.

At this point, we enter the land of Ingmar Bergman, starting with his comedy of infidelity, Smiles of a Summer Night. I remembered this as being more of a sex farce than it actually is. Even as a comedy, it has some rueful commentary on human nature, which is exactly the kind of stuff I go to Bergman for.

Crisis, Ship to India, To Joy, and Summer Interlude are all early Bergman entries before he really found his footing. They range from kind of bad to interesting. Most of them contain some kind of flashback structure.

Wild Strawberries is excellent, winding its interests through memory, guilt, and human connection.

Summer with Monika has one truly classic shot in it, as the titular Monika stares directly into the camera, daring us to judge her for a recent immoral act.

I took a break from Bergman to watch my weekly Saturday movie date with sol_se -- Mirror Mirror 2. This is a bad movie. It is so dull and has a real hesitance to show anything actually happening. However, it does contain baby Mark Ruffalo, so it has some interest.

elipie wanted to celebrate her birthday with The Lion King, so I went. I did not care for it, but she seemed to like it and that's the really important thing.