Raise the Red Lantern, Dark Habits, & Marat/Sade

Raise the Red Lantern was a terrible DVD. Subtitles were sometimes non-existent (what did the red characters separating parts say?) and sometimes completely wrong (savant rather than servant) and other times just very poor English. Plus, why is the video so bad? This is one of the most praised films of the 1990s, and they couldn't bother to fix the grain and add some contrast to the scenes? And, last, and certainly not least, the movie was 5 minutes short. Who the fuck do they think they are putting together that crappy of a DVD? Argh. Which is a shame, because through the bad quality of the DVD, you can see that the actual movie is very good, and that Gong Li is excellent. Damn shame about the DVD.

Dark Habits was a mess of a movie. Too bad, because Almodovar can normally put a bunch of craziness together to make a worthwhile movie. Probably would have been better had I not seen any of his later films, which all dealt with everything in this much better. Maybe it was bigger then to have lesbian and druggie nuns, but it's old hat for him now.

Marat/Sade is a grotesque. The songs were actually not that bad, and the writing was extremely strong. It's just not a film I can really recommend to anyone without the warning that it is full of very messed up things. It is set in an insane asylum, you know. It's a very difficult film. Mainly because Brook was bringing the difficultness of the play to the screen with the added advantage of using cinematic tricks to further confuse and mess with the audience. The whip-pans and strange camera angles occasionally draw you further into the play and make it clear that the viewer is definitely in the audience of a play. The actors don't play to the camera, either. Everything in it is to confront the audience. Given this, why is it so good? Because the actors, Patrick Magee, Glenda Jackson, Ian Richardson, and others, are able to do their job very well. Maybe I need to see the play performed normally, but maybe I can just accept that the movie conveys the play better than watching it ever could. And it's very unlikely anyone could be better than in this movie.