Whether the title refers to candy or flowing sexual juice of one kind or another, or perhaps an emission (like vomit or feces) from some other part of the human anatomy, Dušan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie presents a feast of pleasures—and its opposite. To paraphrase Cole Porter: “It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s disgusting!” To quote Alfred […]
Daily Archives: July 16, 2008
During the Second World War the Weigl Institute, led by Polish biologist Rudolf Weigl, employed Poles, including Jews, resistance fighters and intellectuals, using their blood to produce vaccine for epidemic typhus. This involved injecting lice with human blood and infecting the lice with epidemic typhus. Writer-director Andrzej Żuławski used father Miroslaw’s stories of the Institute […]
This list is chronological, although if there are multiple entries for a given year I have ranked those entries, beginning with my favorite among them. The list reflects my one hundred favorite English-language films, then—at a particular moment, that is, on a particular day. Again, one hundred is a finite, unforgiving number, and everything including […]
Here is the second half of this list. 1954 51. SALT OF THE EARTH. During opening credits, Esperanza is shown, outdoors in a miners’ residential camp, splitting wood for a boiling pot and boiling water. Post-credits, in the mine, a defective blasting fuse causes a near disaster. The new rule is that Mexican-Americans must work […]
Drought has dried the village’s wells. Guinea-Bissau’s war of independence from Portugal has been won and those guerrillas to whom death has been denied have returned home. Fractious, selfish interests war against the unity for which ethnic groups strive. A woman who secured her free allotment of oil before the commodity ran out is selling […]
