#85 of 2010: Freaks

I don't feel like I have to say a whole lot about "Freaks". Someone who was into the fantastic margins of culture- long before I had realized how huge the margins are- told me to watch it years ago, just like someone probably told you to watch it years ago, and if you haven't yet, do. Even as it puts the characters (who are largely identical to the actors who play them, melodramatic relationship crises aside) "on display", the film somehow manages to use the same voyeurism that allows the performers to earn a living as "sideshows" and "monstrosities" towards an opposing goal: it makes us wish that more people were like them. Because there would presumably be a whole lot less marginalization, mistreatment, and self-pity in the world if more people were as accepting, thoughtful, and resourceful as the "freaks" are here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freaks

#70 of 2010: The Blue Angel

i rented this specifically because it was mentioned in the blurb on #71 as an inspiration for that film. i'll save drawing connections for the next post. as for "The Blue Angel" on it's own, it has the distinct flavor of a 30's PSA-ish morality tale without demonizing the woman who "lures" the poor bastard to his "fall" from "respectable society". all those catch-words and -phrases are in quotes to convey the film's ambivalence about defining them. audiences could read the surface of the story as an indictment of lascivious living and wantoness in women (including this shallow super-text floating above the real story is an age old censorship-dodging trick), but if you're paying attention you'll notice that she never deceives him or pretends to be something she's not, and she doesn't pass judgement on him. it's the "fallen" male character who really gets dissected: his obsession with respectability and subsequent "descent" into impropriety, his silly (but destructive) clinging to scraps of the honor he never had, his grotesque inability to settle on a self. i'm not clear on the historical moment in Germany when this was filmed, but i feel like the professor makes a good stand-in for institutional hypocrisy in any era, and the film's real moral is that hypocrisy will tear you apart and leave you death-gripping your old desk in a hobo clown outfit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Angel

#60 of 2010: Angels with Dirty Faces

James Cagney being on screen for a healthy portion of the runtime is reason enough to watch this or any movie in which he stars. his dancerly grace and the bad-kid-with-gusto/lovable-bully persona that he captures are undeniably winning, even when his character is doing what can only be described as despicable. still, that character, Rocky Sullivan, is more resourceful than despicable, and you can't argue that he doesn't have a strong and relatively just (compared to the crooked cops and greedy lawyer) personal code of conduct. but that doesn't mean we don't sympathize with Jerry (Pat O'Brien) and his position. like other gangster films of the era, this acts as a PSA in regards to at-risk youth. yet unlike films like "the public enemy" (another Cagney-full gem with a few legendary scenes) and "scarface" (i'm talkin the original), the anti-hero criminal at the center of "Angels" isn't simply a figure for us to pity, wishing it didn't have to be this way as he spirals down to nothing, whimpering and cornered or disposed of at the hands of rivals. Rocky never seems too far gone, and we know that he isn't because of the final scene. the grey area occupied by this character is ostensibly the same area in which children who tend towards criminality live, too beaten down for the ideals embodied by the priest, but too good to transform completely into hedonistic brutes; this unwillingness to strictly polarize good and bad, saved and lost, citizen and criminal, makes "Angels with Dirty Faces" a compelling entreaty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_with_Dirty_Faces

#56 of 2010: Fritz Lang's M

l killer, fritz lang, german, otto wernicke, peter lorre, social problems, suspense

this "first-cinematic serial killer" film (that's how it's billed in the netflix summary) is much less polarized- in terms of "good v. evil", "victim v. villain", "justice v. retribution", etc.- than you would expect if you hadn't seen anything else by Lang. based on my limited experience of the director's work ("Metropolis"), I certainly wasn't predicting a cut-and-dry morality tale, but I was surprised at just how complex, how condemning and also redeeming of EVERY character/character-type, this movie is. it'll yank on your emotions but it won't tell you what you'd need to do if it was real. you'll see the good in bad guys but it won't hold up outside of present circumstances. you'll see the bad in victim-mothers, and you'll have a hard time placing the divisions between complicity and willful ignorance and helplessness. like any examination of morality with real depth, this movie forces you to judge yourself as you judge its characters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_(1931_film)