Monthly Archives: July 2024

Mathematical Riddles

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Peter Greenaway is not the sort of director who has ever tried to appeal to the average moviegoer or make a mainstream film but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t enjoyed a long and successful career in the cinema. In fact, his 1989 film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover was a surprise box office hit, grossing more than 7.7 million dollars in the U.S., which was highly impressive for an art house flick. Still, his filmography might seem intimidating or of little interest to most American viewers but several of Greenaway’s feature films from the 1980s are quite accessible, if only curious movie lovers would give them a chance. The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and The Belly of an Architect (1987) are good places to begin but my personal favorite is Drowning by Nights (1988), which is a subversive black comedy involving murder, game playing, and a fascination with numbers.

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The Year the Music Died

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Most musicologists and historians of popular culture generally agree that rock and roll is an American creation but, as a lifetime music lover, I particularly love hearing and seeing how that pop culture movement influenced other societies around the globe. You don’t think of a country like Cambodia as a fertile breeding ground for innovative rock and roll but it was – in the late fifties through the mid-seventies – until the Khmer Rouge took control of the country in 1975. At that point rock and roll (and all music and culture considered “foreign” or western to the communist regime) was outlawed and any evidence of it (albums, tapes, etc.) destroyed, effectively erasing almost twenty years of pop culture…or so, they thought. John Pirozzi, director of Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll (2014), discovered enough missing pieces of that forgotten music scene to put together a fascinating and deeply moving portrait of a particular place and time that should appeal to rock and rollers everywhere.

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The Game of Adultery

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The Spanish film poster for THE GAME OF ADULTERY (1973).

Giallo thrillers and spaghetti westerns are generally considered genres created by the Italian film industry but producers and filmmakers in other European countries also created their own versions in these categories, especially in Spain. Director/Screenwriter Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent, a native of Madrid, is best known for his Spanish take on wild west oaters but he did make a film that could be classified as a giallo. El Juego del Adulterio (English title: The Game of Adultery aka The Deadly Triangle, 1973) is blessed with a title that sounds like an erotic melodrama or maybe a softcore soap opera for the grindhouse crowd. It definitely has elements of that but is actually a psychological thriller crossed with a murder mystery.

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The Big Bang

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Why would a scientist create a weapon of mass destruction that was capable of destroying the planet and ending life as we know it? J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan project and is known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” would later become guilt-ridden over his invention but his original intention was altogether different. He wanted to create a weapon so powerful and dangerous that it would intimidate all world leaders into putting an end to war but, of course, that idealistic concept ended in failure because human beings are flawed creatures. This same scenario is mirrored in the Czech sci-fi drama, Krakatit (1948), in which an engineer named Prokop (Karel Hoger) creates a powder that can become explosive and release atomic energy when activated by radio signals or other means. Like Oppenheimer, Prokop quickly comes to regret his discovery but a case of amnesia caused by an accidental explosion complicates the engineer’s desperate search for an associate, Jiri Tomes (Miroslav Homola), who stole the formula.

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Kafkaesque

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In October of 1970, the Canadian government was thrown into a state of turmoil by the actions of Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ), a terrorist group that wanted to achieve independence for Quebec and make it a socialist province. After the FLQ first kidnapped British diplomat James Cross on October 5th and followed it up with the abduction of Quebec Cabinet Minister Pierre Laporte five days later, Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s Prime Minister, called in the army and invoked the War Measures Act, which gave the police complete authority to arrest and interrogate anyone deemed suspicious, regardless of whether there was any evidence or not. Over 400 people were rounded up and subjected to numerous human rights abuses before being released, some after more than 21 days in jail. Les Ordres (1974), a cinema verite dramatization of this incident by Canadian director/cinematographer Michel Brault, follows the travails of five suspects, based on the actual transcripts of their incarceration.

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