ThanksKilling (2009)

Today's recommendation is the fabulous and hilarious 2009 horror movie parody ThanksKilling.

I was alerted to this piece of Cinematic Art by my friend Andrew, to whom I will forever be grateful. I don't even know how to describe ThanksKilling. It's about a group of caricatures of college students on their way home for Thanksgiving, a silly legend, and a foul-mouthed turkey puppet that kills people including, coincidentally, aforementioned college caricatures.

THANKSKILLING reminds me of early Bergman.

It's the best movie ever filmed in Heath, Ohio.
It's the best movie I've ever seen that featured terrible Jon Benet Ramsey jokes.
It's the best movie with a turkey-rape scene that I have watched recently.
Its metacommentary rivals that of some of the most theoretical stuff I have read recently.
It's the best horror movie with John Waters references that I've seen recently.

it is 66 minutes of pure hilarity, of yelling WTF at your TV (or computer or iPhone), of topless Pilgrims,


And that is why today's recommendation is Thankskilling. It is available on Amazon and you can also watch it streaming online through Netflix if you have Netflix.

Start a new Thanksgiving tradition! By that I don't mean turn into undead turkeys and kill people, but watch this movie every year.

unnatural causes

Today's recommendation is the California Newsreel documentary Unnatural Causes, an important documentary that examines how social and economic inequality contributes to the declining life expectancy in the United States, to the decaying social fabric of our society, and many other things. It examines the interrelation of many factors: stress, biology, income, and rather than screeching banshees pointing fingers, the DVD takes a rationalist, biological point of view.

It is a disturbing, upsetting documentary, full of truths you probably don't want to face (or have wanted to avoid thinking about). However, it's one you need to see. It's one you are morally obligated to watch. It's one that examines the few choices we still have, although it may be too late.

The sad truth is, inequality IS making us sick. America is not tenable in its current, apocalyptic, amoral cancerous state of capitalism at all costs. If you don't believe me, watch this masterful 4 hour documentary, and then we'll talk.


The DVD is available only from their site, but here are some
unnatural causes products on amazon

in the furthest country that you did not make up

I'm on a roll! Look at me recommending things 2 for 2! My allergies seem out to kill me, or at least make me extraordinarily lazy. So today's recommendation is not lowering your standards of personal hygiene or accountability and spending days in bed coughing and drinking sugar-free Kool Aid, as I have done.

But, metaphorically, drink my sugar-free Kool-Aid, as I recommend to you:

Beshkempir, the Adopted Son

There are many reasons why I am Recommending this film to you.

Pretension and Elistism. it was made in Kyrgyzstan, a country you would love to play in Scrabble (if you could play proper nouns), even if you probably can't find it on a map (did you ever buy that shower curtain I told you about?). It will make you seem so cultured at cocktail parties, to casually say: "I saw this great Kryzgz movie the other day..."

Sociopolitical and historical awareness. This is one of the first films made in Kyrgyzstan since the fall of the Soviet Union & released internationally. Film has actually been really important in that country / soviet state, as the USSR used film to indoctrinate citizens (as they did elsewhere). Probably, this will be the first Kyrzgz film you'll have seen.

Enjoyable Film in and of Itself. What? Pretense and cultural awareness are not enough reasons for you to watch a movie? Wimp. This highly visual film may lack the CGI 3D effects you have come to expect from the cinema, but the story it tells is timeless. It could take place in virtually any time, save for a few excursions to the movies in the film. The film would work just as well if it were silent. The simple narrative works. The characters aren't archetypes, but humans, but they're comprehensible enough to be relatable, even from what will most likely be a vast cultural, geographical, and linguistic divide.

Reasons other than the 3 or 4 the few critics who've noticed this film have given. Here is what you know about this film from a few Google searches. It's in black & white with "strategic," "sparse" color (and I don't mean gimmicky black & white, like Schindler's List or Guy Maddin - and I appreciate Schindler's List & Maddin's work, but you know what I mean). Some critics / summaries have tactlessly given away the entire plot, which should not be as big of a sin as we make it out to be, but it's a coming of age story (but what does that mean? Whose age? Coming from what to what?). It's a relatable story, so much so that it feels like a memory, a memory from a pleasant perspective that's disjointed temporally. Perhaps it's cultural tourism, perhaps the alien landscape exacerbates the familiar emotive aspects of this story. Perhaps I'm merely re-bloviating the same reasons that critics have given for seeing this movie in the past. Regardless, I highly recommend that you watch it.

The DVD has sadly been discontinued, but you can get it from Netflix, or order it used from Amazon.

We just couldn't say goodbye

Hello, beloved blog readers.

It's been a long time since I Recommended Things at you. My apologies. This semester thing came up. Or rather, it ended, in the ungraceful way it usually does. I've actually been done since Wednesday, but all I have been capable of is staring at my ceiling (it's. so. fascinating) and attempting to respond to hostile emails from students.

But, where do you, beloved blog readers, fit into all of this?

Luckily, I did not work efficiently on my papers. I scoured the Internet and netflix & my DVD collection to procrastinate in the most efficient way possible. I experienced MEDIA! Therefore, I have a slew of new things to recommend to you!

Today's recommendation is Sita Sings the Blues (2008, Nina Paley). I belong to a colloquium about documentaries, and one participant raved about this film (which is not a documentary). I barely noticed that you could watch it on Thirteen until I was looking for ways to not work for 90 minutes or so a few weekends ago. I noticed that David Bordwell recommended it on his blog, and decided to procrastinate by watching it.

Oh, this film. How I wish I could watch it on a big screen, but even on my laptop, its energy and panache took over my soul! The film is a retelling of the Ramayana, set within the framework of a present-day, mediated, intercontinental breakup, punctuated by Annette Hanshaw's jazz vocals. Also, there are cats. And shadow puppet narrators. And the greatest intermission you will ever see in cinema.

The phrase "eye candy" makes me retch, but if you're into that kind of phrase, yes, this is eye candy. Granted, I think that phrase in and of itself dismisses the impact on one's soul that beautiful images can have, like vitamins, but this blog is not about my bizarre linguistic predilections.

Today, this blog is about Sita Sings the Blues.

This is a triumph of postmodern hybridity. The film tells an engaging, entertaining story, but it also is about larger issues, about the power of media and modern technology to give us access to different cultures and stories; it's about cultural heritages both east & west; it's about the power of great literature to speak to our own lives.

Moreover, even if the movie sucked, which it emphatically does not, what Nina Paley is doing for / about copyright certainly warrants a recommendation in and of itself. This film has a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.

You can stream the film for free on thirteen.org and sometime this year, it should be out on DVD. I could not recommend watching it more.

here they do it spiritually.

Good morning, Internet! I'm sitting here with my coffee, pondering what it is I should recommend to you today. After all, I'm trying to stick to no more than one (1) recommendation a day; therefore, they're all very special.


And it seems my better half way outclassed me yesterday with his totally incredible, well-written, well-argued post arguing for human rights. So I feel the ante's been upped. I watched a movie yesterday, in the hopes that I could recommend it to you, but it was truly awful. All you need to know about Venom (1982) is: Klaus Kinski sort of stars in what could be called Snakes on the Thames.

Hmmm...Kinski...always makes me think of Werner Herzog...oh! Of course!

***

Today's recommendation is: Stroszek (Herzog, 1977).

Oh, the love poems I could write about this film. Oh, the incomprehensible over-educated squealings I probably will write about this film.

I saw Stroszek for the first time in the second semester of my first year of college in the first film class I ever took, and I could argue that it's one of the main reasons why I devoted my life* to film. There are many early examples of this; I will recommend each of them to you at a later date.

I had seen Kaspar Hauser in high school (It was one of about 10 "foreign" VHSes our local Blockbuster had), but I had no idea who Bruno S. really was, and it barely penetrated my entitled skull that it was the same director.

But seeing Stroszek on a big screen like that in the teaching auditorium - complete with the faded color palette, the impossibly vertical shots of Berlin, the expansive horizontal shots of Midwestern USA - really changed something for me. At the time, I wanted to be a lawyer or a translator or something, something having to do with words (and, implicitly, power; I did grow up in the suburbs of New Jersey). All was words to me, and I knew plenty, in several languages.

I couldn't have explained it this way at the time, but the film showed me the fallacy and weakness of language. The primacy of jargon in the film, of specialized and privileged languages, demonstrate to me the privilege of the image, which in turn somehow filled me with hope. Auctioneers, prison officials, bankers - it didn't matter what they were saying; you could figure it out from the image. For the first time in my life, words seemed a weak failure. They do right now.

Maybe images are in and of themselves simply another language; I don't know. A greater encompassing universe existed outside of the artificiality of words. This had always been true, but I had never noticed until I'd watched that film.

Herzog's mordantly funny dirge for the American dream was resplendent with tacky roadside Americana, hyperbolic accents, and anonymous countryside, but it also showed seedier parts of Berlin life. Only subtle aspects of the film are temporally-bounded at all - fonts, cars, hairstyles - so it seems a general paean to 20th century Americana, or at least, a very specific kind of Americana - one that may or may not have actually existed. One you see hints of in abandoned roadside stands and places where newer paint is peeling. The characters in Stroszek - Eva, Bruno, and Scheitz - move, cross an ocean, dream big, and the same systems, problems, and power structures follow and consume them. It was both incredibly depressing and awesome, in the old-fashoined, awe-inspiring sense. The world created was so perfect, so believable, so close to mine, yet different. I could watch the sad stories forever.

The film seemed charmingly enamored with its subjects. I really don't believe that Herzog had an exploitative intent. The sadness and absurdly tragic trajectory of the characters' lives seemed, to me, somewhat affectionate.

I don't know what it says about me that I can't find this film as anything but life-affirming and quietly wondrous of the big, big world, that it fills me with a conviction that most of us have a strong survival instinct no matter what - but there you have it.

I won't wreck the ending for you, but I think you will probably disagree with me after you see it. But if you see it after reading this I have more than achieved my goal.


*measured in terms of X, where X = years of educational attainment AND units of tens of thousands of dollars of educational indebtedness.

***
Coda:

I had no way of knowing it when I first saw this film, but the year after I graduated from college, I had the opportunity to go to Germany. It was a strange and alienating year, full of drifting, being privy to much I could not understand, and twice during that year I spent months living in Kreuzberg, one of Bruno's old haunts. I never saw Bruno, I'd wander through the alleyways, getting slightly lost, always imagining I could hear sad accordion music just in the next courtyard.


The New York Times had an article last Christmas about Bruno, complete with a video.