Lately I have been attempting to set up my life for maximum movie watching, in an attempt to stave off the crushing malaise of boredom that comes from endless housework and job applications. Yesterday was a banner day for that. I watched six movies yesterday. Three of them I was meh on, but three really stood out to me, and I want to meditate on them a little.
I will admit I watched Stranger Than Paradise on the Criterion 24/7 showing while doing some of the aforementioned housework, so I may have missed some crucial scenes, but I am writing about it anyways, because I am going to be thinking about it a long time.
You see Cleveland on screen a lot, but never As Cleveland. You probably have seen it as New York in the Avengers, and as Metropolis in the new Superman movie. It’s always a big deal for people here. We were In A Movie. But it always annoys me a little. They’ll film in Cleveland, sure but they won’t tell stories about us.
So when our down on their luck burnouts in Stranger Than Paradise decide to head to Cleveland, on vacation, in the dead of winter, and are surprised to find themselves having a bad time, I was delighted. This leads to a scene so specific, where we are in the post-industrial hellscape of 1980s Cleveland, in one of those boxy little suburbs, probably Parma from the looks of the house. Willie and Eddie, our principle hustler dudes, are uncomfortably sitting on Willie’s aunts couch, while Willie’s beautiful 16 year old cousin and his aunt snip at each other in Hungarian.
I have been there. Many of us have been there. It is not always a 16 year old cousin, and it is not always Hungarian, but we have all been sitting on an an uncomfortable old lady couch while our buddy’s relatives have an argument with an older relative from The Old Country. A universal experience I have never seen on film. Leading to what for me was really the stand out scene of this film for me:
Our trio decides to escape the oppressive environment of the working class Cleveland suburbs to ‘go look at the lake.’ It is the dead of winter. The lake is frozen in an expanse of white that, in the black and white of the film, is almost eye-searing. The wind is whipping incessantly, and the snow is driving. ‘This place is a drag’, Eva says, and she’s not wrong. We have all been there. Standing in the cold, staring at Lake Erie as an excuse to get out of the house because there is simply nothing else to do.
And then they get the idea to go to Florida. At which point I looked up the director, because I knew he had to be from here. Because that’s the classic mindset, of Cleveland in the winter. ‘I should go to Florida, it’s warm there.’ The trick that Jim Jarmusch, who is from Cuyahoga Falls because I don’t know if you could make this movie if you were from anywhere else, knows is that you will not be happier in Florida. Your Essential Self follows you to Florida, and you will be as miserable there as you are staring at the lake as the world’s sharpest snowflakes cut into your cheeks.
After that I watched a couple middling noirs and then my sister shows up, right as Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video comes on and I just didn’t think my sister could handle a Haneke movie, even though I’d been meaning to watch this one. To properly understand my sister I want you to imagine a marshmallow peep that has been transformed into a human woman. She cannot handle meditations on violence in society. She gets worried that watching horror movies will turn me into a murderer. So I put on something I’ve been meaning to watch for years and never manage to get around to:
Hundreds of Beavers. And guys? You have to watch this, if you haven’t yet. I know I’m late to the party on this but you have to. Ideally, with another person you can sit with and laugh at the guy getting the absolute shit kicked out of him by a bunch of dudes in beaver costumes. Somebody you can spitball ideas about where the plot is going with and then get delighted when it does.
‘Why is there a Sherlock Holmes beaver?’ my sister asks.
‘Cus they’re gonna take him to beaver court.’ I respond, being a smart ass. And then they fucking take the guy to beaver court.
‘What are they building?’ I ask, polishing off my sister’s french fries she abandoned in favor of the slapstick beaver movie.
“A rocket ship.” My sister says, sarcastic. Fuck you, I say, and throw a french fry at her. And then the beavers launch a fucking rocket ship.
The whole movie is like this, though I do think half the fun is How Are We Fighting The Beavers Now, so I won’t say too much more about it other than: please watch Hundreds Of Beavers. You have waiting long enough.
And after that I really wasn’t gonna watch anything else. I was scrolling through Shudder because I hadn’t in a while, but idly, not really looking to watch anything. I found their Spotlight On Indonesian Horror and thought ‘neat! I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Indonesian movie before’, still not really planning on watching anything.
And then I found Sangkuriang. The poster is nothing special, a generic 80s wuxia influenced fantasy movie poster. You have seen hundreds of these. But the one line description. It caught me. “An avenging warrior falls in love with his long-lost mother.” It says. And I had to.
What’s wild about this is neither the IMDB, letterboxd, or Mubi listings on this mention the incest, despite it being the central premise of the movie. They all say “After swearing an oath to marry the one who picks up her weaving stick, Dayang Sumba embarks on an unexpected romance with a royal staff member. (source).Which is true. Except for that that’s the first 10 minutes of the movie. It’s like saying the Wizard Of Oz is about a little girl who’s dog gets stolen. True I guess but you’re missing a Whole Lot that comes after that.
I would not actually call Sangkuriang a horror movie, but rather fitting in a genre that’s often called horror because we don’t really have a category for it: the dark, somewhat gory and/or gruesome fairytale movie. Think Tale of Tales, another movie Like This that gets shunted into the horror genre despite being it’s own thing, though in a very different time and place for film. The dark fairytale movie is working on different tropes and plot elements than your standard horror and I think we do them a disservice by not having a standardized genre category for them.
Sangkuriang is extremely made in 1982 for good and for ill. Sometimes this means overlong martial arts fights where people start levitating and turn invisible for no real reason. There is a magic umbrella used as a weapon. Sometimes, however, this means an extended dream sequence to stand in for a sex scene involving mother and son on a rotating bed in the clouds to show how this encounter is both taboo and Fated, as you sit in suspense, waiting for somebody to realize they just slept with a realitive.
There are undoubtably politics I don’t understand with the title character being a fighter of tyrants but because I’m not from Indonesia or 1982 I can’t really speak to them. What I can speak to is that I had a good time throughout this entire movie, and if you like the dark fairytale set up I think this is more than worth watching. It is extremely What It Is, but I think you’ll know from my description if you’ll like it or not.
There’s no real commonalities between these three films besides that I liked them all and watched them all on the same day. I am trying to Give Myself Permission to write about movies even if I don’t have a unifying take. Sure I have ongoing projects, like watching and eventually writing about every Johnnie To movie on Criterion and, eventually, watching a movie from every country in the world. As always, if you watch any of this let me know how you liked them, and ‘see’ you soon.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 