I don’t really get into Second Life (the client tends to crash my computer, for one thing), but this video shows what lovely things can be made in it with enough time and ability at manipulating its objects. It’s Van Gogh’s Starry Night recreated in 3D almost from scratch, set to the Don McLean’s lovely song “Vincent.” This is an older video, but I still like it.

This post is part of a project to watch the Film Bloggers’ 100 Favorite Non-English Films. See my progress here.

Day of Wrath
Denmark 1943; dir: Carl Theodor Dreyer
starring: Lisbeth Movin, Thorkild Roose, Preben Lerdorff Rye
screened: 12/18/07, VHS

Previous Viewing Experience: Never seen it.

Knowledge Before Viewing: Not too much, just that it’s a Dreyer film. I haven’t actually seen any Dreyer films, unless you count the few minutes of The Passion of Joan of Arc that Godard includes in Vivre sa vie. There’s some religious aspect to it, I think–inquisition or persecution or something.

Brief Synopsis: Anna, a young seventeenth-century woman married to a much older pastor charged with rooting out and interrogating witches, finds it difficult to escape being accused as a witch herself when she falls in love with her husband’s son.

Initial Viewing Response: I’m not sure what to write about this one, largely because I’m sort of ambivalent about it. The cinematography is pretty (and would have been prettier with a better print, I’m betting, if better prints exist any more), and the painterly framing is very evocative. Dreyer gets a good performance from Lisbeth Movin, especially, though her shift from sweet and innocent girl to someone you’d almost believe is a witch is a bit more abrupt than I would’ve liked. Yet you never really lose sympathy for her, even though she does rather blatantly cheat on her husband with his son–the accusation of witchcraft in the seventeenth century was basically a self-fulfilling prophecy, as proven by the “trial” and “confession” of an old woman near the beginning of the film (the woman curses the pastor and his family as she dies, which also complicates the motivations in the rest of the film). Apparently, the pastor married Anna when she was little more than a child without really getting her input on the arrangement (a plot point that probably would have been better revealed earlier than it was, by the way), and his mother hates her and refuses to give her any say in the household, so she’s never had the opportunity to make any decisions on her own. Not that I’m saying starting an affair with her husband’s grown son Martin was a good decision, but still. It’s a bit of a step from that to her being a witch–seemingly the default accusation for any woman who doesn’t behave precisely as the men around her want and expect.

Given that Dreyer made this film in 1943 in Denmark, I was expecting the Inquisition to be more overtly Nazi-like. They sort of were at the beginning, when trying to force the old woman to name names and take other “witches” down with her, but as the story shifted more and more over to Anna, I didn’t see it as much. Still, I think there was enough similarity to get Dreyer in big trouble, forcing him to leave the country.

Reflective Response: A week later now; I’m still ambivalent. The fact that the old woman who was burned at the stake at the beginning cursed the pastor and Anna bothers me. It almost suggests that the old woman was a witch, and though that doesn’t make the torturous interrogation techniques she was subjected to any less horrific, her vindictive attitude does waver my sympathy for her a little bit. Similarly, Anna is very sweet and demure at the beginning and becomes almost dislikable near the end. (The very end, when she realizes that there’s really nothing she can do to avoid accusation, regains any sympathy she may have lost.) It’s tempting to apply feminist criticism to the film, which would read Anna as oppressed at the beginning, subjugated into passivity by a patriarchal system; as she moves into self-affirmation and asserts her own will, she naturally appears less “sweet,” because she’s rebelling against the norms that value “sweet” women and attempting to become a strong woman instead, a move which results in an accusation of witchcraft by the patriarchal establishment. That reading makes a lot of sense, though trying to work the film’s religious background into a feminist reading makes my brain hurt.

I often judge a film’s greatness based on how well it sticks with me–how much I can’t stop thinking about it after I’ve watched it. I haven’t really thought about Day of Wrath at all since I watched it (until I sat down to write this). The only scenes that have really stayed with me are the interrogation scene of the old woman and Anna’s realization that she’s trapped by her mother-in-law’s accusation. The first is understated and yet horrible, while the second is tremendously well-played, showing up in minute shifts in the actress’s expression. Oh, wait, I forgot. One of the most beautiful and virtuosic shots follows Anna as she crosses a large, columned room to overhear the judgment on the old woman. It combines the high-contrast cinematography that Dreyer inherited from German Expressionism (and would soon be a key feature of film noir) and the deep focus photography from contemporary films like Citizen Kane.

Mark suggested that I atone for my previous elitist post by posting an eye-candy action movie sequence. I’ve been trying to think of an unusual one to match the parkour scene from District B-13 I posted a while back, but what with being on vacation, home, and my computer deciding not to let me access the internet on my dad’s network (forcing me to sneak time on his computer after he’s gone to bed), I opted instead to settle for my all-time favorite shoot-out scene from The Matrix.

The major film critic awards have been trickling out over the past few weeks, most of them honoring the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men and other semi-indie, art-house end of the year releases, prompting Time’s Richard Corliss to wonder “Do Film Critics Know Anything?”. Basically, he likes all the films that won, but thinks perhaps the film critics awards are an exercise in mutual affirmation of the type of films that film critics like, but that average moviegoers haven’t seen and don’t care about. And he’s afraid that the Golden Globes and Oscars are going to follow the film critics’ lead and nominate a bunch of stuff most people haven’t seen. (The Globe nominations came out last week, and he’s mostly right.)

But the Golden Globes and the Oscars, if they follow the critics’ lead, will have V.D.D. — viewer deficit disorder. Large numbers of people won’t watch shows paying tribute to movies they haven’t seen. In the old Golden Age days, most contenders for the top Oscars were popular movies that had a little art. Now they’re art films that have a little, very little, popularity. The serious movies Hollywood gives awards to in January and February are precisely the kind it avoids making for most of the year. The Oscars are largely an affirmative action program, where the industry scratches its niche. The show is a conscience soother, but not a crowd pleaser.

I guess my question is, first, so what? And second, um, so what? The Oscars have been accurate tests of cinematic quality since never; they used to be more populist, as he says, perhaps, but they’re always political. They’re always calculated. He does allow that the film critic groups should pick whatever they want to pick, but then bemoans the fact that *shocker* the rest of the awards might actually listen to critics? We might have fewer craptastic movies coming out of Hollywood if *shocker* the average moviegoer listened to critics. And if we had fewer craptastic movies coming out of Hollywood, maybe then they’d get more awards come award season. Just a thought. (He does mention critically-acclaimed popular films like Knocked Up and how they’ve gotten passed by so far this year…personally I disliked Knocked Up, so…)

Plus, I figure the more small, indie, artsy films that get honored at awards time, the more visibility they have, the more people will go see them, and then more people will learn what sort of cinematic treasures lurk outside the multiplex. (I’m being elitist. I’m sorry, I have to to counter Corliss’s rather odd populism…I like blockbusters too, but they don’t need awards–they get plenty of viewership without them.) It’s the small films that NEED critics to promote them, to bring them to a public consciousness that they won’t get from television and radio ads. And October-January (aka awards-preparation season) is the only time they get highlighted.

I don’t really understand why the Oscar show needs to be a crowd-pleaser. Is Corliss working for the network that’s airing them, trying to figure out how to get them more viewers? If people are only interested in watching the summer blockbusters they loved get awards, there are the People’s Choice Awards, the Blockbuster Awards, the Kid’s Choice Awards, and probably others. Let them watch those telecasts, and leave the Globes and the Oscars for those of us who WANT Julie Christie to win an award for so brilliantly portraying an Alzheimer’s patient (Away from Her), and who WANT the Coen brothers to finally win an Oscar for one of the most cinematically perfect films of the year (No Country for Old Men), and who WANT the innovative French animators who worked on Persepolis to win an Oscar over Pixar (who are awesome, don’t get me wrong, but they already have a bunch of little naked gold men), and who WANT festival fare to do well enough in awards season to get screentime in the areas where we live, since going to festivals isn’t what you might call feasible for a lot of us.

If you ask me, the problem isn’t that art-house films get too much attention at the end of the year awards, but that they don’t get enough attention during the rest of the year. It’s not that the awards aren’t populist enough, but that there’s such an unfortunate audience split between popular and art-house.

This is some pretty awesome guitar-playing. The real kind, not the Guitar Hero kind. Found via Lisa on Facebook.

The commercials for American Idol have been talking about a big change for this year, and I immediately hoped they were going to start including instruments, something that Australian Idol has done for the last two years to great success. And I was right! I’m really excited now. Incidentally, I hadn’t meant to stop posting Australian Idol highlights, but I got so far behind watching them that I just haven’t done much with it. They’re done with the season now (and I’ve managed to stay unspoiled, which I didn’t last year), but I’m still about eight weeks from the end in my watching–hopefully I’ll finish it in the next few weeks and give y’all a few of the best performances.

Let’s hope the addition of instruments on our Idol brings on some singer-songwriters who do well, because that would be AWESOME.

We had a Spaced marathon last night, and this was probably my favorite scene (of many). Spaced is a British sitcom written by and starring Simon Pegg of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. In this scene, Tim (Pegg) and Daisy (Jessica Stevenson) are confronted by a group of young thugs who are angry because they thought they had bought weed from the couple; in fact, Daisy had given them a packet of oregano. Tim and Daisy get out of the situation by pulling fake guns and shooting the thugs down. This was set up by an earlier scene, wherein Tim and his buddy Mike demonstrated that any group of males, whether they know each other or not, will succumb to the fake gunfight scenario. It’s brilliant and hilarious. As is the whole show, so you should try to see it, even though it’s difficult since it’s only available on Region 2 DVD (Europe). Lots of it is online, though, if you check around. ;)

Well, I figured out what’s going on with the Blogger commenting issue. It isn’t a bug; it’s intentional. The Blogger team has added OpenID support for commenting in their Beta (or Draft) version of Blogger, to replace the manual name/URL option–hoping to encourage the use of OpenID and maybe reduce comment spam, I think. See their post about it here. In the meantime, for some crazy reason they thought it would be a good idea to take off the name/URL commenting not only in the Draft version, but also the current version, which does NOT yet have OpenID support. So, basically, they completely screwed everyone who isn’t using the Draft version.

I don’t think it’s a good idea, anyway, to get rid of the name/URL field…it took me more than half an hour to get an OpenID account and get it set up with my blog URL so I could comment and air my complaints about the whole thing. Now, granted, that’s a one-time thing, but it’s still a barrier of entry to the casual commenter, who will probably decide not to comment at all rather than go through the hassle. If I hadn’t been really angry about the implementation of this “feature” which seems to be actively trying to keep me from commenting on my friends’ blogs and wanted to let Blogger know how angry I was, I probably wouldn’t have bothered either.

In any case, the hassle I just went through doesn’t really do me much good, since the feature isn’t available in the current release yet. If you do want to implement it, you can log into your Blogger blog using draft.blogger.com instead of www.blogger.com, go to your dashboard settings under comments and select “Registered Users – includes OpenID” under “Who Can Comment?” Note that if you do this, there won’t be an option for anonymous commenting anymore. edit: Actually, you can set it to “Anyone” and OpenId is included. I swear it wasn’t when I checked a second ago, but I tried it again and it was. end edit I’m not necessarily suggesting you do it, just saying that you can. So basically, you can allow anyone to comment but they’re unable to leave URLs, or you can limit commenters to people with OpenIDs or Blogger accounts (which link to their profile rather than their blog, even if their blog is on Blogger, which can lead to confusion if they have more than one Blogger blog). Talk about exponentially increasing the barrier of entry for commenters, especially for those of us who have a strong mixture of casual readers without blogs (and probably without OpenIDs) and bloggers who don’t use Blogger. edit: So this complaint is mostly moot, though I still think forcing people to sign up for OpenID if they want to leave their URL is a bit heavy-handed. end edit

I like the support for OpenID; eventually being able to have one ID across many platforms is going to be almost necessary in the fragmented online world, but that time is not really here yet, and there needs to be an option for allowing traceable comments without forcing people to sign up for OpenID. I’m sorry, but even though I know what the issue is now, I still think Blogger dropped the ball on this. Anyone who wants to switch to WordPress.com or a self-hosted WordPress blog (or other blog platform, but I haven’t found one as easy to use and full-featured as WordPress yet, plus OPEN SOURCE, so I always recommend it), the time is right.