Aint love grand!

This film was so bizarre it was hilarious! Based around actual voice audio recordings of the leader of a horse-love club in America, Zoo relates the events surrounding the prominent death of security-cleared Missile engineer Kenneth Pinyan of a burst colon (work it out!) on a farm one evening a few years ago. Despite everyone knowing who the man was, his work was so classified no one could name him after his death for many years. He loved missiles and he loved horses..

Whilst, despite the circumstances, his death was tragic, this film is more of a comedy listening to obviously very disturbed individuals justifying their interest in zooifilia, yes doing it with horses.

Fortunately we are spared any actual footage of said activity (well there was a tiny glimpse, but you could look away like me), despite the club filling buckets with recorded DVDs and videos of their shenanigans.

Not illegal at the time (quickly made illegal after this case hit the news) the perpetrators are free to act the victim and explain that we all just “don’t get it”.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the film was the female vet who supposedly saved one of the horses from this ill-treatment by promptly having him gelded to stop the horse-lovers coming back for more. I felt nothing but sympathy for the poor beast as it was hardly his fault and couldn’t help but think she was somewhat messed up herself in some kind of man-hating way (but then maybe that’s just those Zoo’s tricking me). The film ends with her riding the castrated animal proudly, almost as bizarre as the animals former “friends”.

A delightful compilation of all the Carry on films put together in a 1 and a half hour extravaganza, hosted by Kenneth Williams and Barbara Windsor.

If you are a fan of the Carry on films as I am this is a delightful treat bringing back memories from so many great films. Yeh ok they were silly movies and they used the same old jokes over and over, but they were comfortable and always good for a laugh!

My only criticism is probably that they ignored many of the black and white films which were just as good, if not sometimes even better.

Eddie is growing up..mostly outwards

You have to be something of a Stoic to sit through this film, I actually had a look at it because it was made by HBO (usually means a big tick) and it starred Edward Furlong who was the Terminator II boy then the trainee nazi skinhead in American History X.

The whole film is set in a prison cell (something of a regular thing for HBO if you have seen the Oz series) and a dispute that develops over the course of a night. Horrible things ensue as you might expect with men caged up like rats and this is not a film for the faint hearted. You can feel the suffocation and caged rage as the films events unfold.

I will not ruin the film for you by explaining what happens, but this is one film that goes someway to explaining why some men act the way they do in Gaol or at least tries to.

Bit of effort to find a tasteful graphic for this one..

Being old and middle-aged I was lucky enough (or perhaps in view of the film itself “unlucky enough” is more accurate) to see Salo when it was not banned in Australia. During the dark days of the Howard Regime of course a lot of films wowsers obviously could not understand got themselves banned after being available to see for decades. Every backward society goes through these phases, they even banned Last Tango in Paris in some places. After all if I am in government and I find something offensive then I must ban it from everyone according to my own moral and religious dictum’s, regardless of whether they actually agree with them (not)…

Salo is perhaps most appropriately about fascism (see above) and is one of those films that is both awful to watch and so full of metaphors and symbols you have to sit through it at least once if you are a serious student of films. The central characters are a duke, magistrate, bishop and president representing the four forms of authority and from this the films many themes about abuse of power develop.

The film has been greatly criticized for its scenes of torture and various cruelty; that’s if you just watch them out of context and are into finger pointing. When you consider that the Director Pier Paolo Pasolini himself was a prisoner of the Gestapo and tortured over two days during World War II, you kind of start to see he might be trying to say something by the set days of torture inflicted on the films victims. Clearly he had experienced the basest of human behavior first-hand and wanted to show to us warts and all what was never shown in the history books. Clearly he had experienced abusive power (in his case nazism) first hand and wanted to horrify us by what unchecked power can be capable of.

Another criticism of the film was that the victims were represented as teenagers (although the actors were clearly older), extremists of the type that ended up seeing the film banned even suggested it was child pornography! Perhaps they are unaware that teenagers engage in sexuality? (if you could call anything in Salo “Sex’) I suspect they really felt as I do that the film was even more yucky because it was happening to adolescents. I doubt however that the film would have had its terrible impact had Pasolini inflicted his torture upon old crones and people my age; its the very fact that the victims are so young and innocent that we feel greater pity rather than maybe morbid curiosity in our emotionally blunted culture.

I can not say that Salo is a great film achievement because it isn’t and there are many problems with the way certain themes are investigated. I tend to feel that films should enlighten and inform, that suggestion is films greater power rather than actual graphic depiction. But that’s just what I think personally and everyone should have the right to see this or any film if they choose, to make up their own mind what is and isn’t offensive.

The on again off again banning of Salo

In Australia young girls giggle and talk about boys..in Africa they run at you screaming with an AK 47 or is that the other way around…

Rebelle or “War Witch” is the story of a child solider in Africa. Whilst the film was made by a Canadian company in the french language, there is considerable input from the inhabitants of that African continent producing a very realistic rendering of African child soldiers today.

Komona is abducted from her village and forced to shoot her parents to show her loyalty. She is then forced into a brutal training regime for one of the many wars Africa has going on all the time.

She somehow develops the ability to “see” where the enemy is hiding (the film gets all magic mushroomy and fantastic here) and becomes known as a witch. Probably because of the milky hallucinogenic sap the other soldiers keep forcing her to drink..She is taken to the rebel leader to act as his War Witch and advise him on tactics according to ritual.

Ok I know you all watched it to see Christina Rici naked!

One of Sweet Wednesday Adams (Christina Ricci’s) better works; not that she has really made a dud movie now that I think about it (she did worry me a bit in Monster though!), but Prozac Nation is probably some of her best work.

What is immediately striking about the film is the level of authenticity the director has sought in representing bipolar illness. Unlike other films directly on the subject like Mr Jones, Prozac Nation keeps the Hollywood drama to a minimum with little in the way of huge dramatic events; just the little debilitating things that make life almost impossible to bear for its many sufferers.

If you know someone with a depressive illness or bipolar you should watch this film, watch it even if you don’t to see a brilliant performance from Ricci and a film that asks awkward questions about the American lack-of-health-care-system (hopefully of old if Obama does his thing) and why exactly so many people are depressed and taking antidepressants in our culture.

A classic British psycho-thriller from the 1960’s Peeping Tom broke some new ground in the way film language describes mentally ill people. The film was quite controversial when it first appeared on our screens, some critics suggested that it in a lot of ways it put us the audience in the role of the peeping Tom..then again I’m sure that’s exactly what was intended. A lot of critics however got on their moral high-horse and effectively destroyed director Michael Powell’s career in England.

Peeping Tom follows a man who derives sexual pleasure from filming women in their dying moments, so he goes about killing them here there and everywhere. Carl Boehm is eery as the central character Mark Lewis who meets a girl he actually likes and struggles against his wanton needs..their are moments of tension in this film where you can cut the air with a knife all with that beautiful 1960’s colour!

He’s just got to be a sex-case with that moustache

A ground breaking film that explores two alternative journeys of young men dealing with sexual abuse by their little league coach as children.

Neil ends up as a teenage hustler, he always believed the abuse to be consensual as he had gay feelings from a young age. He believes the abuse made him “special”. As a teenager he no longer feels special and has unsafe encounters with older men somehow acting out the abuse over and over again.

Brian believes he was abducted by aliens because his family once saw a UFO. Until his nightmares begin to take on greater clarity he has visions of aliens violating his body.

The two finally meet and sitting in the house where Brian was first abused as a child they unravel the deeply hidden memories of the abuse.

A very hard film to watch which comes to us from Austria where the country was horrified by the kidnap and imprisonment of Natascha Kampusch for most of her childhood. After her release there was a gruesome sexualization of her plight by the Austrian press and later questions began to be asked about how the press reports such crimes.

The director of this film gives us no such option, being careful to avoid just this treatment of the subject. Michael starts off looking like an ordinary father and son getting about their business, until they get home and Michael is locked in a cellar. We realize he is a prisoner allowed out on carefully controlled walks and the man is a phaedophile horribly abusing him with almost commonplace disregard for the child. Fortunately most of the abuse is heavily implied and we are not subjected to the horrors of an over-graphic warts and all American telemovie.

This film has Brilliant performances from the main stars and it is impossible not to feel tormented anguish for the imprisoned boy (or indeed to feel like slowly torturing the man to death) so good is the acting. Hard as it is you will have to watch this movie to its end, the director torments us a fair bit in the last section of the film, but (spoiling it for you) this one won’t leave you sleepless.

The true story of Doctor Kinsey who compiled the Kinsey Report in the late 1940’s: the first serious attempt to define and catalog the various parameters of human sexuality.

Liam Neeson gives a very believable performance as a man of science who sometimes get a little bit over-involved in his research. A often very amusing study of the times where it was considered that masturbation and oral sex would cause a wide range of terrible illnesses!