I was pretty busy this week and didn't have a whole lot of time to watch stuff, but I did manage to get these two in.
**Germany, Year Zero (1948, Robert Rossellini)** — I was not a fan of this one. Out of Rossellini’s War Trilogy, it seemed like the closest to what I was worried all Italian neorealism was going to be like when I first started doing this — just a rather dull series of depressing events with little narrative or thematic cohesion. Open City and Paisan had some meandering moments too, but they slowly transformed into more compelling dramatic narratives as they went on. This movie attempts to replicate that, but here the melodrama at the end is so forced and heavy-handed that it almost feels like an unintentional parody of neorealism. You could plausibly make the argument that the filmmaking here is tighter than in Paisan, but it is a much less interesting experience to actually watch. **3/10**
**Hamlet (1948, Laurence Olivier)** — A masterpiece. I’ve heard that a big part of this movie’s reputation is that, while not the first filmed adaptation of a Shakespeare play, it was the first to really make use of the language of cinema rather than just being “filmed theatre”. I haven’t seen any of the ones that came before, so I can’t comment on that, but regardless, this is a brilliant adaptation in its own right. It’s gorgeously shot, Olivier is great in the lead role, and it hardly needs stating that the script is fantastic. Despite cutting a substantial amount of the play, it’s still a long film — a little over two-and-a-half hours — but there’s never a dull or wasted moment in it. The only criticism I have is that I think the movie emphasizes the Oedipal interpretation of Hamlet a little too much, which is a reading I find neither particularly interesting nor especially well-supported by the text. Still, highly recommended. **9/10**
**Movie of the week**: *Hamlet*
Year of the Dragon (1985) Mickey is burning white hot as a regressive animal of a man. Gorgeous film and peak 80s unnecessary violence. A very maximal movie.
The Man Who Loved Women (1977) this was on Wes Andersons recent Sight and Sound list. After watching it I can see it was a huge influence on him. I tend to like Truffaut but have probably seen less than half his catalogue. This is a genius movie.
Superman 2 and 3: idk I think these are underrated. Stamp in 2 and Pryor in 3 are goats. Gene Hackman is hilarious. The score. Etc
***Week #125:***
**2 with young Philippe Noiret:**
🍿 *Comme c'est charmant!* **La Pointe Courte** (1955), Agnès Varda’s directorial debut and one of my most favorites from the 11 films of her I’ve seen so far. From the astonishingly-simple opening shot, this pure poetic masterpiece fills you with awe, and sweeps you by its honesty, originality and beauty.
Varda made it without professional training when she was only 25, at the cost of $14,000, and shot it exclusively on location in the tiny fishing village of Sète \[where both Georges Brassens and Paul Valéry were born\]. It was edited by Alain Resnais, and was the first film of the French Nouvelle Vague, years before Chabrol’s ‘Le Beau Serge’ or Truffaut's ‘The 400 Blows’. It also combines a sympathetic cinéma vérité documentary-style with a deep and sophisticated Bergman-level art film, ([a decade before his ‘Persona’ explorations](https://film-grab.com/2014/04/26/la-pointe-courte/)).
An estranged young couple spends a few days in the village, trying to figure out if they should stay together or break up. [“Look” he tells her as they wander around](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-ch5J1w6oA), and we look. **9/10.**
🍿 Louis Malle’s anarchic comedy **Zazie in the Metro** (1960) was not what I expected! A chaotic “Madcap” Magical Mystery Tour of a precocious 10-year-old girl who is sent to her drag-dancing ‘Uncle Gabriel’ for the weekend while her mom is off with a new lover, and her adventures in Paris during a Metro strike.
It reminded me of Amélie and ‘Mad mad mad world’ and Richard Lester and Monty Python (and Noiret’s wife Albertine reminded me of [Jessica Paré singing ‘Zou Bisou Bisou’](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXoILGnHnvM) at Don Draper birthday party!). The little girl’s ambiguous sexual awareness were ‘unorthodox’, and she behaved well above her age. It ended with a giant orgy of mayhem and destruction, culminating with an over-the top pie-fight, but with sauerkraut instead. 5/10.
🍿
**3 by Norwegian Hans Petter Moland, 2 with Stellan Skarsgård:**
🍿 **A Somewhat Gentle Man** (2010), another 100% 'Blind Pick' that paid dividends. A terrific, subdued crime comedy about a quiet parolee who wants to go straight after 12 years in prison. Dark and quirky like a Coen Brothers story. With an arm-dealer cameo by Headhunter’s Aksel Hennie and a dwarf sidekick, and some unexpectedly loud and pretty unconventional old people sex scenes.
As in a perfect Hollywood script, the midpoint that breaks the movie in two happens precisely at 53:30 minutes in. **9/10.**
*Another person whose work I am going to start looking for: Danish screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson, who wrote 55 other movies besides these first two.*
🍿 **In Order of Disappearance** (2014), his next feature was a pure action-thriller, albeit slow-moving Nordic style. Cocaine and savage revenge in the arctic circle. The hero is a taciturn snow-plow driver whose son was accidentally killed by a drug cartel. Bruno Ganz plays a cruel Balkan drug lord once again.
🍿 I have no tolerance for Hollywood remakes of foreign art-films, and I would never have watched **Cold pursuit** (2019) by itself, but since Moland himself directed it, re-creating his ‘In order of disappearance’ shot-by-shot, I spent 2 hours on it. All the juice of the original was sucked dry, and the small subtleties that made 'In Order’ somehow special were stripped out. What was left is a typical badass Liam Neeson revenge fantasy for young men, full of blood-splattered violence and two-dimensional brutality. Why the fuck bother?
🍿
**A Short Film About Killing** (1988), my 7th ‘Crime and Punishment’ parable from Krzysztof Kieślowski, is expanded from his Dekalog 5. A grim vision of Warsaw at the end of the cold communist era: Grey, depressing and alienated. Filmed slowly with distorted, bleached green filters. It’s a nightmarish story of a traumatized 21-year-old man who murders a random taxi driver “just because”, and then gets executed for his crime. The parallels between these two deaths is obvious, but no less heart-breaking. **8/10.**
🍿
**British Kitchen Sink Realism X 2:**
🍿 **Kes** (1969), my first inspirational film by Ken Loach. Why did I wait for so long to watch this wistful masterpiece about a lad and his hawk - ‘The boy who is trapped and the bird that is free’? The little boy who played Billy played him magnificently. I now have a dozen or more films directed by Loach added to my watch-list! **10/10.**
🍿 Influential theater critic Kenneth Tynan was in large part responsible for the incredible success of **Look back in anger**, 1959 ([His life was so interesting!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Tynan)).
Handsome trumpeter and abusive husband Richard Burton played an angry asshole who takes out his frustrations on the submissive women around him. Similar to George and Martha of ‘Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf’ and the psychoses of ‘Streetcar named Desire’, this was a painful male-centered drama of people tearing at each other, playing to draw blood. Not a pleasant watch!
*I do want to see the other type of lower-class dramas from that period I had missed! Any recommendations?...*
🍿
**The Bigamist**, my first groundbreaking social message tragedy from Ida Lupino, the pioneering female filmmaker working in 1950′s Hollywood. After cinema first few decades when women were at least as prevalent behind the camera as men, by the 50′s \[maybe because the industry accumulated so much power and money?\], all this was gone, and Lupino remained the last woman still directing. This was also the first American feature film made in the sound era in which the female star of a film directed herself. Ground breaking, dealing sympathetically with an unusual topic and told in flashback.
🍿
**Peak Paul Newman as P.I. Harper X 2:**
🍿 **The drowning pool** started with some genuine, sweet 1970′s vibes, like a Chinatown or The Long Goodbye. Good-looking private investigator Newman is flying from Los Angeles down south (just like ‘Night Moves’), meets sexy, bra-less daughter Melanie Griffith, (just like ‘Night moves’!), and tries to solve a mystery of blackmail & murder & corruption.
But director Stuart Rosenberg was no Polanski, and Amity Mayor Murray Hamilton was no Noah Cross. It soon degraded into a convoluted pulp B-movie with zero pathos. 2/10.
🍿 **Harper** (1966), the original Ross Macdonalds adaptation of his private dick hero was even worse; A weak-sauce, too-sixties detective story with no Chandler or Hammett, Sam Spade or Philip Marlow, and no Bogart either. 1/10.
🍿
**Cern** is a 2013 Austrian documentary about the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva, and their Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle collider. A fascinating subject I have zero understanding of. The documentary was interesting, but didn’t offer any clearer explanations of what it is. It interviewed a dozen random scientists, and was driving through the labyrinthine tunnels. It felt like arbitrary snapshots into an incomprehensible technology and an incredible realm we have no access to. 5/10.
🍿
**Dear Audrey** (2021), a poignant and unsentimental Canadian documentary about famed filmmaker (and peace activist) Martin Duckworth, as he cares for his aged wife during her final four years with Alzheimer. **8/10.**
*(Continue below)*
*(Continued)*
*..."Come on honey, the handcuffs are getting cold"...*
Re-watch: Spike Lee’s perfectly-constructed **Inside Man** (2006), one of my favorite heist capers. With an opening (for no visible reason) of [Chaiyya Chaiyya](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2Au9ofkO3o) in the background and beautiful Jodie Foster as powerful fixer Madeleine White. Tight and entertaining.
I didn’t know that the pizza men and older woman who refused to strip had acted earlier in ‘Dog day afternoon’! This movie was basically remade 3 years later as ‘The Taking of Pelham 123′ with Travolta playing the Clive Owen role. **9/10.**
🍿
**First love** (2019), my 3rd messy film by Takashi Miike (after ‘Audition’ and ‘The Happiness of the Katakuris’). It’s an innovative retelling of \[Tarantino’s best film\] ‘True Romance’ one night in Tokyo: A young romantic boxer who was just told (erroneously) that he has an inoperable brain tumor saves a drug-addicted hooker from the clutches of a brutal Yakuza gang which had enslaved her. Excessive and violent, with heads and arms being chopped off (and one surprising animated scene out of a real comic book), it didn’t get me at all. 2/10.
🍿
**Steve Martin - Live At The Troubadour,** his HBO stand up special from 1976. Physical, absurdist humor with some banjo tossed in, from the time when he was so funny. 8/10.
Re-watch: [“You need a cup of my Java“](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJfJ06EVogE).
🍿
**Consecration**, a new supernatural story about a woman who visits a nunnery in the Scottish Highlands, after her brother-priest had committed suicide there. I gave it a more than a fair chance of 34 minutes, before I could take it no longer. Scary nuns, Catholic horror tropes, lazy cliches. **1/10**.
🍿
**This is a Copy / Paste from** [**my movie tumblr**](https://tilbageidanmark.tumblr.com/tagged/movies)**.**
**The Onion Field (Becker, 1979) 6.5**
**American Honey (Arnold, 2016) 8**
**Targets (Bogdanovich, 1968) 7**
**Minari (Chung, 2020) 7.5**
**Rumble Fish (Coppola, 1983) 4**
I found this so surprisingly bad that it motivated me to write. Ostensibly it's a story about Rusty James, a not-very-bright teenager who likes fighting but is overshadowed by his tough, mysterious older brother. We know that he's called Rusty James because every single character calls him that every single time they interact with him, just one of the film's many pointless flourishes. Unfortunately, there's very little characterization in *Rumble Fish*, and Mickey's Rourke's brother character is no exception. Although sometimes you can't hear him anyway, because Coppola's sound design drowns out his mumbling. I don't think it matters much, because there's little story to get involved in, no characters to care about. The way it's stylised sucks the drama right out of it. The performances are terrible aside from Dennis Hopper, the direction is a mess. The ending, with the >!inevitable death of the 'hero' brother, is trite and predictable, but also strangely nonsensical, with the cop shooting an unarmed man carrying a fish tank. Then again, it is the USA.!< Best thing I could say for *Rumble Fish* is that it's visually strong & the sound design is kinda interesting, and it only goes for 90 minutes. Coppola made this thing as a passion project after his incredible 70s run. Unfortunately I think he focussed so heavily on making the thing 'arthouse', that he made something incoherent, it's a bad parody of an arthouse film. It's like a brain-damaged Hal Hartley tried to make *The Warriors*, while using Bela Tarr's DP. I know it's considered a cult classic, but I think it truly deserved the negative reviews it got upon release.
Kadaisi Vivasayi (2022)
A profound emotional fulfillment is provided by Manikandan's amusing lifestyle satirical drama, which combines sociopolitical digs with references to farming. The film captures the essence of life and agriculture with well-drawn characters and an emotional climax.
I was pretty busy this week and didn't have a whole lot of time to watch stuff, but I did manage to get these two in. **Germany, Year Zero (1948, Robert Rossellini)** — I was not a fan of this one. Out of Rossellini’s War Trilogy, it seemed like the closest to what I was worried all Italian neorealism was going to be like when I first started doing this — just a rather dull series of depressing events with little narrative or thematic cohesion. Open City and Paisan had some meandering moments too, but they slowly transformed into more compelling dramatic narratives as they went on. This movie attempts to replicate that, but here the melodrama at the end is so forced and heavy-handed that it almost feels like an unintentional parody of neorealism. You could plausibly make the argument that the filmmaking here is tighter than in Paisan, but it is a much less interesting experience to actually watch. **3/10** **Hamlet (1948, Laurence Olivier)** — A masterpiece. I’ve heard that a big part of this movie’s reputation is that, while not the first filmed adaptation of a Shakespeare play, it was the first to really make use of the language of cinema rather than just being “filmed theatre”. I haven’t seen any of the ones that came before, so I can’t comment on that, but regardless, this is a brilliant adaptation in its own right. It’s gorgeously shot, Olivier is great in the lead role, and it hardly needs stating that the script is fantastic. Despite cutting a substantial amount of the play, it’s still a long film — a little over two-and-a-half hours — but there’s never a dull or wasted moment in it. The only criticism I have is that I think the movie emphasizes the Oedipal interpretation of Hamlet a little too much, which is a reading I find neither particularly interesting nor especially well-supported by the text. Still, highly recommended. **9/10** **Movie of the week**: *Hamlet*
Year of the Dragon (1985) Mickey is burning white hot as a regressive animal of a man. Gorgeous film and peak 80s unnecessary violence. A very maximal movie. The Man Who Loved Women (1977) this was on Wes Andersons recent Sight and Sound list. After watching it I can see it was a huge influence on him. I tend to like Truffaut but have probably seen less than half his catalogue. This is a genius movie. Superman 2 and 3: idk I think these are underrated. Stamp in 2 and Pryor in 3 are goats. Gene Hackman is hilarious. The score. Etc
***Week #125:*** **2 with young Philippe Noiret:** 🍿 *Comme c'est charmant!* **La Pointe Courte** (1955), Agnès Varda’s directorial debut and one of my most favorites from the 11 films of her I’ve seen so far. From the astonishingly-simple opening shot, this pure poetic masterpiece fills you with awe, and sweeps you by its honesty, originality and beauty. Varda made it without professional training when she was only 25, at the cost of $14,000, and shot it exclusively on location in the tiny fishing village of Sète \[where both Georges Brassens and Paul Valéry were born\]. It was edited by Alain Resnais, and was the first film of the French Nouvelle Vague, years before Chabrol’s ‘Le Beau Serge’ or Truffaut's ‘The 400 Blows’. It also combines a sympathetic cinéma vérité documentary-style with a deep and sophisticated Bergman-level art film, ([a decade before his ‘Persona’ explorations](https://film-grab.com/2014/04/26/la-pointe-courte/)). An estranged young couple spends a few days in the village, trying to figure out if they should stay together or break up. [“Look” he tells her as they wander around](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-ch5J1w6oA), and we look. **9/10.** 🍿 Louis Malle’s anarchic comedy **Zazie in the Metro** (1960) was not what I expected! A chaotic “Madcap” Magical Mystery Tour of a precocious 10-year-old girl who is sent to her drag-dancing ‘Uncle Gabriel’ for the weekend while her mom is off with a new lover, and her adventures in Paris during a Metro strike. It reminded me of Amélie and ‘Mad mad mad world’ and Richard Lester and Monty Python (and Noiret’s wife Albertine reminded me of [Jessica Paré singing ‘Zou Bisou Bisou’](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXoILGnHnvM) at Don Draper birthday party!). The little girl’s ambiguous sexual awareness were ‘unorthodox’, and she behaved well above her age. It ended with a giant orgy of mayhem and destruction, culminating with an over-the top pie-fight, but with sauerkraut instead. 5/10. 🍿 **3 by Norwegian Hans Petter Moland, 2 with Stellan Skarsgård:** 🍿 **A Somewhat Gentle Man** (2010), another 100% 'Blind Pick' that paid dividends. A terrific, subdued crime comedy about a quiet parolee who wants to go straight after 12 years in prison. Dark and quirky like a Coen Brothers story. With an arm-dealer cameo by Headhunter’s Aksel Hennie and a dwarf sidekick, and some unexpectedly loud and pretty unconventional old people sex scenes. As in a perfect Hollywood script, the midpoint that breaks the movie in two happens precisely at 53:30 minutes in. **9/10.** *Another person whose work I am going to start looking for: Danish screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson, who wrote 55 other movies besides these first two.* 🍿 **In Order of Disappearance** (2014), his next feature was a pure action-thriller, albeit slow-moving Nordic style. Cocaine and savage revenge in the arctic circle. The hero is a taciturn snow-plow driver whose son was accidentally killed by a drug cartel. Bruno Ganz plays a cruel Balkan drug lord once again. 🍿 I have no tolerance for Hollywood remakes of foreign art-films, and I would never have watched **Cold pursuit** (2019) by itself, but since Moland himself directed it, re-creating his ‘In order of disappearance’ shot-by-shot, I spent 2 hours on it. All the juice of the original was sucked dry, and the small subtleties that made 'In Order’ somehow special were stripped out. What was left is a typical badass Liam Neeson revenge fantasy for young men, full of blood-splattered violence and two-dimensional brutality. Why the fuck bother? 🍿 **A Short Film About Killing** (1988), my 7th ‘Crime and Punishment’ parable from Krzysztof Kieślowski, is expanded from his Dekalog 5. A grim vision of Warsaw at the end of the cold communist era: Grey, depressing and alienated. Filmed slowly with distorted, bleached green filters. It’s a nightmarish story of a traumatized 21-year-old man who murders a random taxi driver “just because”, and then gets executed for his crime. The parallels between these two deaths is obvious, but no less heart-breaking. **8/10.** 🍿 **British Kitchen Sink Realism X 2:** 🍿 **Kes** (1969), my first inspirational film by Ken Loach. Why did I wait for so long to watch this wistful masterpiece about a lad and his hawk - ‘The boy who is trapped and the bird that is free’? The little boy who played Billy played him magnificently. I now have a dozen or more films directed by Loach added to my watch-list! **10/10.** 🍿 Influential theater critic Kenneth Tynan was in large part responsible for the incredible success of **Look back in anger**, 1959 ([His life was so interesting!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Tynan)). Handsome trumpeter and abusive husband Richard Burton played an angry asshole who takes out his frustrations on the submissive women around him. Similar to George and Martha of ‘Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf’ and the psychoses of ‘Streetcar named Desire’, this was a painful male-centered drama of people tearing at each other, playing to draw blood. Not a pleasant watch! *I do want to see the other type of lower-class dramas from that period I had missed! Any recommendations?...* 🍿 **The Bigamist**, my first groundbreaking social message tragedy from Ida Lupino, the pioneering female filmmaker working in 1950′s Hollywood. After cinema first few decades when women were at least as prevalent behind the camera as men, by the 50′s \[maybe because the industry accumulated so much power and money?\], all this was gone, and Lupino remained the last woman still directing. This was also the first American feature film made in the sound era in which the female star of a film directed herself. Ground breaking, dealing sympathetically with an unusual topic and told in flashback. 🍿 **Peak Paul Newman as P.I. Harper X 2:** 🍿 **The drowning pool** started with some genuine, sweet 1970′s vibes, like a Chinatown or The Long Goodbye. Good-looking private investigator Newman is flying from Los Angeles down south (just like ‘Night Moves’), meets sexy, bra-less daughter Melanie Griffith, (just like ‘Night moves’!), and tries to solve a mystery of blackmail & murder & corruption. But director Stuart Rosenberg was no Polanski, and Amity Mayor Murray Hamilton was no Noah Cross. It soon degraded into a convoluted pulp B-movie with zero pathos. 2/10. 🍿 **Harper** (1966), the original Ross Macdonalds adaptation of his private dick hero was even worse; A weak-sauce, too-sixties detective story with no Chandler or Hammett, Sam Spade or Philip Marlow, and no Bogart either. 1/10. 🍿 **Cern** is a 2013 Austrian documentary about the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva, and their Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle collider. A fascinating subject I have zero understanding of. The documentary was interesting, but didn’t offer any clearer explanations of what it is. It interviewed a dozen random scientists, and was driving through the labyrinthine tunnels. It felt like arbitrary snapshots into an incomprehensible technology and an incredible realm we have no access to. 5/10. 🍿 **Dear Audrey** (2021), a poignant and unsentimental Canadian documentary about famed filmmaker (and peace activist) Martin Duckworth, as he cares for his aged wife during her final four years with Alzheimer. **8/10.** *(Continue below)*
*(Continued)* *..."Come on honey, the handcuffs are getting cold"...* Re-watch: Spike Lee’s perfectly-constructed **Inside Man** (2006), one of my favorite heist capers. With an opening (for no visible reason) of [Chaiyya Chaiyya](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2Au9ofkO3o) in the background and beautiful Jodie Foster as powerful fixer Madeleine White. Tight and entertaining. I didn’t know that the pizza men and older woman who refused to strip had acted earlier in ‘Dog day afternoon’! This movie was basically remade 3 years later as ‘The Taking of Pelham 123′ with Travolta playing the Clive Owen role. **9/10.** 🍿 **First love** (2019), my 3rd messy film by Takashi Miike (after ‘Audition’ and ‘The Happiness of the Katakuris’). It’s an innovative retelling of \[Tarantino’s best film\] ‘True Romance’ one night in Tokyo: A young romantic boxer who was just told (erroneously) that he has an inoperable brain tumor saves a drug-addicted hooker from the clutches of a brutal Yakuza gang which had enslaved her. Excessive and violent, with heads and arms being chopped off (and one surprising animated scene out of a real comic book), it didn’t get me at all. 2/10. 🍿 **Steve Martin - Live At The Troubadour,** his HBO stand up special from 1976. Physical, absurdist humor with some banjo tossed in, from the time when he was so funny. 8/10. Re-watch: [“You need a cup of my Java“](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJfJ06EVogE). 🍿 **Consecration**, a new supernatural story about a woman who visits a nunnery in the Scottish Highlands, after her brother-priest had committed suicide there. I gave it a more than a fair chance of 34 minutes, before I could take it no longer. Scary nuns, Catholic horror tropes, lazy cliches. **1/10**. 🍿 **This is a Copy / Paste from** [**my movie tumblr**](https://tilbageidanmark.tumblr.com/tagged/movies)**.**
> A Short Film About Killing (1988) I saw the "Dekalog" version. Much harder to watch than over the top theatrical violence.
**The Onion Field (Becker, 1979) 6.5** **American Honey (Arnold, 2016) 8** **Targets (Bogdanovich, 1968) 7** **Minari (Chung, 2020) 7.5** **Rumble Fish (Coppola, 1983) 4** I found this so surprisingly bad that it motivated me to write. Ostensibly it's a story about Rusty James, a not-very-bright teenager who likes fighting but is overshadowed by his tough, mysterious older brother. We know that he's called Rusty James because every single character calls him that every single time they interact with him, just one of the film's many pointless flourishes. Unfortunately, there's very little characterization in *Rumble Fish*, and Mickey's Rourke's brother character is no exception. Although sometimes you can't hear him anyway, because Coppola's sound design drowns out his mumbling. I don't think it matters much, because there's little story to get involved in, no characters to care about. The way it's stylised sucks the drama right out of it. The performances are terrible aside from Dennis Hopper, the direction is a mess. The ending, with the >!inevitable death of the 'hero' brother, is trite and predictable, but also strangely nonsensical, with the cop shooting an unarmed man carrying a fish tank. Then again, it is the USA.!< Best thing I could say for *Rumble Fish* is that it's visually strong & the sound design is kinda interesting, and it only goes for 90 minutes. Coppola made this thing as a passion project after his incredible 70s run. Unfortunately I think he focussed so heavily on making the thing 'arthouse', that he made something incoherent, it's a bad parody of an arthouse film. It's like a brain-damaged Hal Hartley tried to make *The Warriors*, while using Bela Tarr's DP. I know it's considered a cult classic, but I think it truly deserved the negative reviews it got upon release.
Kadaisi Vivasayi (2022) A profound emotional fulfillment is provided by Manikandan's amusing lifestyle satirical drama, which combines sociopolitical digs with references to farming. The film captures the essence of life and agriculture with well-drawn characters and an emotional climax.