Dogs Bark

The Daughters Of Achelous - - 3 Women (1977, USA, Color, 124 minutes) - - 18 June 2019

Recommended. Why does a remembered dream seem so strange? Freud claimed because it hid closeted messages. But there’s nothing particularly outré about a magic eight-ball. Perhaps the strangeness of dreams comes from some chemical process in the brain . . . a paused secretion of some essential biochemical extract that creates a sense of the real. It may be similar to what makes an Oscar winner feel like a failure at three in the morning. Now, I don’t know if 70’s auteur Robert Altman (M.A.S.H.) used to wake up depressed, but he claimed that the idea of 3 Women did come from a dream. The characters spun by Sissy Spacek (Carrie), Janice Rule (The Swimmer), and, especially, Shelly Duvall (The Shining) do seem surreal, shimmering pagan wraths, shape-shifting their way through a desert mirage. The pace is languid, but plot driven; the meaning, however, is elusive . . .  even to Altman in the DVD commentary.

Do I Amuse You? - - Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019, USA, Color, 142 min) - - 11 June 2019

Strongly recommended. Someday Bob Dylan will be dead. All the tricks will be 100% unambiguously . . . done. Martin Scorsese takes a second (No Direction Home) trip upon this swirling ship but now he’s part of the joke. Actually, there are at least four jokes in this movie that I won’t spoil and everything else about Scorsese’s delightful movie reminds you, maybe long afterward, why this can not be a documentary; instead, a story about how the times create a Man who never existed. I had tremendous trouble with Dylan in the late 1980s and so did he, hurling bricks at himself. Herein, he seems amused by all that. Perhaps this movie is an apology for the tricks he played on us by playing an even more outrageous, but purposeful, trick. Perhaps a final blessing by Allen Ginsberg - - intercut with Dylan and McGuinn knocking on the door - - leaves behind a reasonable explanation.

My Ms. Brooks - - Tagebuch Einer Verlorenen [Diary Of A Lost Girl] (1929, Germany, B/W, 104 min) - - 8 June 2019

An essential. If you want to know what Gloria Swanson was talking about in Sunset Boulevard, you need to see Louise Brooks (Pandora’s Box) in Diary Of A Lost Girl. Like Norma Desmond, Brooksie could say anything with her eyes. And such gorgeous eyes! Despite this, Austrian Director Georg Wilhelm (GW) Pabst (The White Hell of Pitz Palu) was more than Brooksie’s Max Von Mayerling. This movie is loaded with unique shots, dramatic lighting, in a sense, all of the Expressionist elements that distinguished pre-war German cinema. The supporting cast is wonderful, particularly Andrews Engelmann (G.P.U.) and Valeska Gert (The Threepenny Opera) in the reformatory scenes and Martha von Kossatzky as the madam who takes in Brooks. Diary Of A Lost Girl suffered numerous censorship cuts; despite the sexually liberated times, this movie - - like Pandora’s Box - - really trains its sight on the patriarchy and this was verboten even for Weimar.

The Still, Small Voice That Thunders In The Night - - Deadwood: The Movie (2019, USA, Color, 110 min) - - 31 May 2019

Strongly recommended. Although some may become angered at this observation, the true exceptionalism of the American story is that such an awful, violent, and profane country could produce a few things so sublime. Of course, one could also say that of men, in general. So, at the end of Deadwood: The Experience, we might conclude that the exception America creates, to this day, is the shockingly accurate summation of Homo Sapiens: The Species that it offers. This is why David Milch’s creation was so great. He took up the challenge of returning to this metaphor, the legend and fact of Ransom Stoddard. And the poignancy of Deadwood: The Movie emerged, quite obviously, from the quilted departure of Al Swearingen, filled with, possibly, Milch’s final words on the subject. “I’m over now,” Al seems to say, “The remainder of the story, I leave you cocksuckers to chronicle. You’ll do just fine.”