Living Through What Feels Like "The Barkley Marathons: The Race that Eats its Young"

Good day!

I hope everyone reading is safe, healthy, and having a nice weekend.

We're back for another attempt to write a brief movie review!

Today's entry:

"The Barkley Marathons: The Race that Eats its Young" (2014)

This is a documentary about one of the most brutal trail races in the world.  While extreme sports generally do very little for me, this movie gave me exactly what I wanted: a study of all the bizarre ins and outs of this race, including a peak into the extremely selective application process, the origins of the race, the old-school,  low-tech ways in which runners have to account for their completion of the track, and the community of arguably completely unhinged athletes who insist on subjecting themselves to a race that is explicitly designed to be an ordeal of excruciating physical exertion.  I would have expected to have very little patience for Lazarus Lake, the main officiant and manager of the Barkley, but his odd, idiosyncratic, and admittedly sadistic sense of creativity and humor are actually strangely appealing.  This was an enjoyable and interesting watch!

I gave this movie a 4.

(Look!  Actually one paragraph!)

{Heart}

Just a Little Sprinkle of "The Salt of the Earth"

Hi team,

Okay!  Let's see if I can write only a paragraph (okay maybe two paragraphs) about a movie!

My first attempt at the exercise in restraint:

"The Salt of the Earth" (2014)

This documentary profiles the superlative photographer Sebastião Salgado by not only following him as he works on a current project, but also interviewing him as he reflects on a decades-spanning career documenting incredible moments in human history and illuminating corners of human life that are often overlooked.  Salgado's telling of his personal biography is punctuated by his memories of extended periods of work photographing working conditions in a Brazilian mine, life in South America, and genocides in Africa and Europe.  The progression of his work into darker and darker chapters of human history leads to his inevitably increasing disgust and disillusionment with humanity as a whole. 

This is a difficult yet extraordinary and stunningly beautiful film--proof that it lives up to the astonishing photography created by its subject.  Salgado has borne witness to profound and devastating human suffering, creating images that are at once, seemingly impossibly, heart-rending and exquisite.  His photographs refuse to surrender your gaze, insisting that you see what he has seen.  The challenge of this movie is in contending with his angry accusation: How could we let these things happen?  In showing how Salgado nevertheless persists in his career despite what he is witnessed, this film creates a sense of hope without fully relieving us of the imperative to be better custodians of our fellow human beings and our planet.

Salgado was already one of my favorite photographers.  "The Salt of the Earth" has only deepened my love for him and his work.  I gave the film a 5.

{Heart}

"Our Little Sister" is "Still Walking" Through Some Delightful Films

Dear reading friends,

Much to my sincere surprise and pleasure, I have discovered something about babies that works very strongly to our shared advantage: they sleep a lot.

Specifically, they sleep a lot on their parents, gluing said parents to couches and other sittable surfaces, often with at best only one hand free and nothing but time to kill...

...thus creating basically perfect circumstances under which to watch movies?!  Like I'm basically being held hostage by baby naps and my only recourse is all the movies.  And this was true even before staying the hell inside was our civic duty and an overall wise, appropriately cautious thing to do.

I have thereby wildly, dare I say obscenely?, contradicted my earlier concerns about not being able to watch movies.  As long as one is okay with watching films in many many small, irregular-length segments, one can blow through quite a lot of cinema.

While I was first wading into the waters of all of the movies, I was a bit haphazard in what I would watch.  Many of my selections were just the stuff that was available on whatever streaming service I happened to be browsing.

But then, realizing that this hostage situation may be ongoing for some time (and again, ever exacerbated by the current pandemic), I decided to get more strategic.  I started digging around for curated lists of movies to work through.

At first, I defaulted to general "best movies of all time" lists, only to promptly realize that the vast majority of these "greatest" films were profoundly white- and male-centric, making them a bit tiresome.  That rigidly consistent and limited point of view leads to repetitive narratives and a narrowing-down of what movies are capable of.  There are some major exceptions to that overall tiresomeness, of course, but those lists just weren't making it feel like my suddenly abundant movie-watching time was being optimally spent.  There is so much more out there!

So instead, I very happily turned to the following lists, which I have been using as guidance in my movie feast for a few weeks now:

An overall list of the best international and art house films of all time
A list of the best independent films of the last decade (which includes international films)
A list of the best international films of the last decade
A list of the best French films of all time
A list of films shot by female cinematographers

One of the most delightful discoveries I've happened upon during this personal festival of films is the work of Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda.  I have now watched five of his movies, and I want to tell you about two of them.

Those two are:

"Aruitemo Aruitemo", or "Still Walking" (2008)

and

"Umimachi Diary", or "Our Little Sister" (2015)

A quick practical note: In this post, I'll be referring to these films using their anglicized titles.  I'm making that arguably fraught choice because, in my experience, these are the titles under which these films tend to be listed when searching from America.  I would otherwise prefer to use their original Japanese titles, but I also want to ensure that anyone in the States unfamiliar with these movies is able to find and enjoy them.  Actually, after striking out attempting to find "Aruitemo Aruitemo" and/or "Still Walking" by searching for the movie by name, I found that the most effective way to find these movies was to search for the director, which on Roku does not include the hyphen (so, "Hirokazu Koreeda").  It's obviously problematic that these adjustments are required to access his work.

And now, a little preamble that I swear is relevant: one of my favorite books is Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.  I love that book so much because of the complexity and richness of its interpersonal narrative; it is packed with so many characters whose lives you follow for years, watching them grow and change and interact.  In many ways it feels like such a quiet story, simply because its focus is expressed in its tantalizing and inviting opening sentence: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.  Of course a psychologist would love a book setting that fact forth as its premise.

As I love Anna Karenina, so I love Hirokazu Kore-eda's "Still Walking" and "Our Little Sister".

So much of what I find intoxicating about these films is how startlingly yet blissfully authentic they feel.  Most of Kore-eda's films spend ample time in his character's homes--time that feels deeply intimate, because the homes look actually lived in.  They are not perfectly curated and decorated, but are instead a bit utilitarian and a bit cluttered, creating a pleasurable sense of trust, non-pretension, veracity, and intimacy, like you’re being invited into someone’s actual home.

"Still Walking"

"Our Little Sister"

As families stroll about their neighborhoods, either to visit a loved one’s grave site or go to the beach, you can almost feel the heat of the sun bouncing off the bleached white walls of the buildings they pass eased by the delicious breeze that flutters the leaves on the trees.

"Still Walking"

"Our Little Sister"

The dialogue, and the drama that hinges on it, is written and delivered quietly.  There are only rare moments of intense emotion, and even these are restrained--no shouting, no hysterics, no drama reliant only on volume to let you know that it's drama.  Characters make little jokes, talk about their lives, share their hopes, emotions, and memories, all with a lived-in nuance that is a lovely mirror to the lived-in environments they inhabit.

All of this provides a beautiful canvas on which Kore-eda creates studies in the tradition of Tolstoy: close, subtle, thoughtful, and surprisingly affecting studies of families.  He appears particularly interested in the changed dynamics of parenting and family relationships post-divorce, the often unspoken tensions, pain, distance, disappointments, and yet enduring affections between parents and their adult children, and the wistfulness of grief over the current or anticipated loss of aging matriarchs and patriarchs.

"Still Walking"

"Our Little Sister"

Through this complex emotional territory, there is almost an innocence to Kore-eda's films that makes them easier and gentler.  Especially in these two films, there is no nudity, violence, or vulgarity.  These stories are sustained simply on the merits of their veracity and focus on the everyday lives of families.  "Still Walking" covers only a brief overnight visit to aging parents while "Our Little Sisters" spans months, yet both films deeply endear and attach you to the people they introduce you to.

"Still Walking"

"Our Little Sister"

I am so grateful to have discovered and deeply enjoyed these films.  I gave them both a 5!

In closing, a matter of housekeeping: Because I'm so happy to have gotten to see so many movies recently AND I'm trying to ensure that I'm able to keep up with writing for this blog, I'm going to try writing very brief reviews of movies--maybe 1-3 paragraphs--so I have the chance to share my thoughts on more of them.  I'm really going to be wrestling with my perfectionism here, as this will limit my ability to say all the things and also might require a loosening of my expectations for including photos and just-so formatting (translation: I will be working on not writing only posts like this one, although I obviously enjoy writing them very much!).  This will therefore be both an opportunity to write about more films, which is exciting, but also to put my money where my mouth is with some tolerating-imperfection exposures.  Especially during this ugly and frightening era we're enduring, it's important to give ourselves permission to be a bit messy so we can focus on finding beauty and joy where it nevertheless remains.

{Heart}

A Titan of Cinema, or: The Man Played Chess with Death!!

Hey guys,

The world we live in is suddenly so disrupted, bizarre, and single-mindedly focused on the COVID-19 pandemic that it feels like pretty much everything else could be overlooked.

Knowing that, I insist that we take a few moments to note that the incredible Max von Sydow died last week.

Husband insisted on the title of today's post, because for some time I've apparently been on a 1-3 year cycle of declaring that von Sydow is "A Titan of Cinema", only to back up my declaration with the unassailable proof implicit in, "The Man played chess with Death!!"

For anyone not terribly familiar with von Sydow's work: he was in over 100 films, including many of the seminal movies directed by Ingmar Bergman, in a career that spanned multiple decades.

I am so brokenhearted that he's gone.  Von Sydow was so sneakily ubiquitous through generations of cinema that it felt like he would live forever.  He had a beautiful, gaunt, haunted face--as if carved from stone--that nevertheless comforted and grounded me, because at least for the moments he was onscreen, we were assuredly in good hands.

He was gravitas personified.  He would have to be to take on the hefty roles whose cloaks he so readily threw around his shoulders.

What a time for him to die: when arguably his most iconic role was that of a crusader playing chess with Death during the Plague.

I rewatched "The Seventh Seal" (1957) last week to mourn him, and was unusually comforted by it. When I watched it for the first time when I was in high school, I remember feeling stunned and frightened at the thought of living through the terrifying, bleak, mercilessly deadly era portrayed in the movie.  A part of me simply couldn't fully accept that human beings had lived through a period that dizzyingly lethal.

And yet, they did.  They did their best to endure it, in sometimes monstrous, sometimes frivolous, and sometimes lovely ways.  As embodied by von Sydow's crusader, they sometimes had the courage and desperate stubbornness to face the anguish of mortality and demand answers, even if those answers never came.

No one asks to live through a once-in-a-century contagion.  The fear many of us feel at watching the world come to a screeching halt at the hands of an invisible viral menace is valid, rooted in the reptilian survive-at-all-costs parts of our brains as much as the historical marrow of our bones that can, on some level, remember the plagues of the distant past.

But if there's anything to take home from the last few posts I've written, it's that humanity is ceaseless in its ability to craft beauty out of its own pain, to bring forth light from darkness.  "The Seventh Seal" is hardly in and of itself uplifting, but what is is its preservation, for generations to come, of the cinematic giant at its heart.

Goodbye Max.

{Heart}