Nightmares Come At Night (2nd review) 1970 / The Girl From Rio 1969

Nightmares Come At Night was one of my early favorites when I'd only seen a handful of Jess Franco films. I'm still rather impressed but its clearly 2nd tier Franco, more of an experimental film than a big personal work or radical storytelling. But it IS quite shocking, moving and timeless as I stated in the first review. But this time I was more aware of how the film has Franco really juggling his familiar tropes in a big departure. This film explores his usual dark vixens as victims of oppressive Aryan so-called feminism. He subverts and deconstructs the subtly racist "Betty and Veronica" tropes in Western media, as David Lynch would much later and Hitchcock had already done to a more conservative degree. Franco pulls no punches in exploring the sexual intimidation and systemic degradation by white Europeans to their Latin brothers and sisters. Around this period Jess moved further to a so called "primitivism" and tribal art. The film is full of African and Eastern sounds and shapes and our heroine has a Hindu ceremony before transcending her bleak situation. I imagine Franco was deeply moved by Thich Quang Duc, the Vietnamese Buddhist who set himself on fire famously in 1963, and is lampshading his sacrificial suicide with this film's climax.

The Girl From Rio is a film I can watch endlessly. Its a James Bond-sploitation film that finds its star in "Goldfinger" actress Shirley Eaton who plays a villain more clever, cruel and human than Blofeld. The narrative concerns a Feminist revolution standing in the way of our generic male lead and his useless MacGuffin. In the end, the women triumph and its the greedy nationalist agency that suffers. Its a great plot that luckily has a budget to allow lots of toys for Jess to play with. The film is full of gags, action, setpieces, powerful compositions and elaborate staging. Here he is allowed to run wild into pure surrealism and create a phantasmagorical experience of the cinematic world. This was a major break for him. He never again got a budget to make anything so visually explosive or epically designed, but this solidified his hallucinogenic trademarked style. Maybe he knew this was his final big commercial work and decided to go out with a bang and abuse his budget to make a film as challenging and stylistically daring as possible, career be damned. And he never looked back.

I can't believe these films were made a year apart. That year shows everything Franco gave up and everything he gained. And in short he did it to be the feminist director that was not yet tolerated in mainstream world markets. Two films in two different arenas and decades but both baring the same bold genius.

Females need female versions of 80s sex comedies. Most women don't know how to please a man in the bedroom, which is why we have a culture (especially in film) based on women as objects of desire for "desirable" men rather than pursuing their own desires,

I don't see much feminism in movies

The actresses I see getting acclaim are terribly one-dimensional. Its their youth & beauty (which will fade) that are always showcased, violently fetishized now to even more younger and vain actresses. Hollywood, twitter and instagram's female celebrities are like a cult of vain, plastic, youth-worshipping witches who have no value outside of looks.

Gal Gadot, Zendaya, the little Stranger Things girl, the Logan girl, the Annabelle cast, pretty much every actress under 30 in a film or show this year was the exact same character: depressive, waifish, "desirable object" girl-children who get a predictable moment to strike back but are ultimately tools. Hollywood has this perverted fixation with this female image. And eerily, this is true to life of a generation of very vain, vacuous little girls who are being indoctrinated into the old system.

And as usual, women over 30 are depressed moms & career women, mindless sex goddesses who kick ass or crazy old ladies who are funny. Of course there are films like Pitch Perfect 3 or those (Blank) Moms comedies and there's an upcoming pro-Hillary slate of all-female ensemble dramas. But why are female-focused films always relegated to unoriginal plots based on bland male-focused films? Ghostbusters was an experiment to go the other way, but that was just sacrilege. Does Hollywood fear giving a good script to women? Are they afraid of showing women of different ages getting along? It can't be in the nature of women to be obnoxious catty harpies. This is the male idea that they simply roleplay to get by and spend male money to survive.

With the long overdue destruction of the Weinberg empire, let's usher in real women in film. Realistic characters, written and directed and PRODUCED by women

The Last Jedi's producer Kathleen Kennedy has tried earnestly to make a feminist blockbuster in The Last Jedi. It did big business but the film sucked. There was a strong scent of chauvinism involved but also the feminist message didn't fit the story (which was foolishly written and directed). And the "underdog" heroine is uninteresting and handed everything.

I don't think audiences or creators in power have any clue how real victims of sexism (WORKING CLASS WOMEN) are a cog in the giant system of exploitation and oppression. Clearly as the films are still stupid and audiences still pay for the empty Mary Sue, the infantilized Lolita, the evil Ice Queen and the generally worshiped Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

Get Out did a great job deconstructing the insidious nature of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype. Mother! was a valiant effort to contextualize the Ice Queen and the Infantilized Lolita. Wonder Woman's characterization is very problematic to me in Justice League and her own film, but it is a push towards heroines with some depth (even if its still very shallow, cartoony, childish). But its still not enough.

Hillary Clinton is a hard person to defend or empathize with, but how did the country empathize with a complete woman-hating troll/creep/huckster/demon over a "nasty woman"? Because we've had generation after generation of women in the public who are simply cartoons with no inner life. Hillary is an example of this but she's also a symptom of the real problem. We need better representation of everyone. I don't even think we need female superheroes or 3rd-wave propaganda or "Girl Power!" buddy comedies. Just write women as people!!!!

The most progressive and respectful instance of feminist writing was oddly in Roger Corman's Death Race 2050. Two women, both supporting characters, meet at a bar called Bechdel's to discuss the male protagonist in a great tongue-in-cheek Dadaist moment. Its subtle, meta protest to the way they are relegated in the oppressive world of the film. Filmmakers need to lampoon cliches to shred their power and create a better work environment for women everywhere. They are half of the audience :P

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? 1969

There have been plenty of films about dancing and the worst seem to be about dance contests, but here is the anti-"dance contest movie". Apparently the USSR would show this film in schools as anti-capitalist propaganda. And thats what it was meant as. Its a very pessimistic, brutally honest study of the shady human nature inherent in exploitation. It uses the early days of Hollywood as a backdrop for the story's angry frustration and tears. Its a feminist story mostly. How women, youth, patriotism, blacks, the working class and anyone who believes the American Dream is pimped and gutted by the lawless governing system of money-driven entertainment. The protagonists are literally teased with hopes of success and artistic expression to become consumable meat puppets for the local bourgeoisie.

I can't recommend this any more without giving away important plot details and spoiling things. This is a great film from Sydney Pollack based on a Great Gatsby-esque novel and Jane Fonda kills it acting-wise. Keep in mind that this perfectly reflected the countercultural mood in post-Vietnam, anti-hippie America. Its just as bleak as Bonnie and Clyde or Easy Rider but with a bitter, ironic Old Hollywood style. Brilliant stuff.