Alléluia. Fabrice Du Welz, 2014.
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Edition screened: StudioCanal DVD, released 2014. French language with English Subtitles. Runtime approximately 93 minutes.
Summary: No particular depictions of violence or harm to animals.
Challenge of the Masters
Challenge of the Masters (Liu A-Cai yu Huang Fei-Hong). Liu Chia-Liang, 1976.
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Edition screened: Included in Arrow Blu-ray box set Shawscope: Volume 1, released 2021. Cantonese language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 97 minutes.
Summary: No depictions of violence or harm to animals. The criminal antagonist travels with a caged bird, but there is no interaction with or harm to the bird.
Chinatown Kid
Chinatown Kid (Tang ren jie xiao zi). Chang Cheh, 1977.
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Edition screened: Included in Arrow Blu-ray box set Shawscope: Volume 1, released 2021. Cantonese language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 115 minutes.
Summary: No depictions of violence or harm to animals.
The Cincinnati Kid
The Cincinnati Kid. Norman Jewison, 1965.
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Edition screened: Warner Blu-ray, released 2011. English language. Runtime approximately 103 minutes.
Summary: Cock fighting.
Details: The birds are held in the fighting pit and taunted beginning at 33:47. The actual fight is 34:43 through 35:59, including blood splatters and clear images of one rooster very badly wounded and near death.
Executioners from Shaolin
Executioners from Shaolin (Hong Xi Guan). Liu Chia-Liang, 1977.
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Edition screened: Included in Arrow Blu-ray box set Shawscope: Volume 1, released 2021. Mandarin language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 100 minutes.
Summary: No depictions of violence or harm to animals.
Fairy Tales (Hurwitz)
Fairy Tales. Harry Hurwitz (as Harry Tampa), 1978.
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Edition screened: Full Moon Blu-ray, released 2022. English language. Runtime approximately 76 minutes.
Summary: No particular depictions of violence or harm to animals.
Femalien 2: The Search for Kara
Femalien 2: The Search for Kara. Cybil Richards, 1998.
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Edition screened: Full Moon DVD, released 2012. English language. Runtime approximately 92 minutes.
Summary: No animals or references to animals in the film. 1.5/5❤
Khrustalyov, My Car!
Khrustalyov, My Car! (Khrustalyov, Mashinu!). Aleksey German, 1998.
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Edition screened: Arrow Blu-ray, released 2019. Russian language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 148 minutes.
Summary: Rough handling of domestic animals, but no representations of those animals being injured.
Details:
1) At the beginning of the film, the teenage boy who likes 1950’s science and inventions has harnessed the family dog to the clothes line, as seen in a brief shot of the dog sailing through the cluttered apartment.
2) A large fish is stored in a bath tub, luring the cat to jump into the tub (off-screen). After the splash, the soaking white cat is scruffed and hand-squeegeed.
The Mighty Peking Man
The Mighty Peking Man (Xing xing wang). Ho Meng-Hua, 1977.
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Edition screened: Included in Arrow Blu-ray box set Shawscope: Volume 1, released 2021. Mandarin language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 90 minutes.
Summary: Depictions of pseudosafari animal cruelty.
Details:
1) Using superimposition techniques, the illusion is created that men are shooting pistols and rifles into a herd of charging elephants, 9:26-10:24. Although not visually realistic, this scene is especially disturbing because small young elephants are at the front of the herd. The worst scene is 10:20-10:24, where a man shoots an elephant at very close range until it falls over dead. This could not have been made without footage of an elephant being shot.
2) Men shoot at and wrestle a tiger, 14:42-15:21. The tiger gets away and later is revealed to be one of Sexy Jungle Girl’s numerous pet kitties.
3) A pet leopard attacks and kills a cobra for biting SJG in her privates, 30:56-31:20.
4) The movie begins as a novel remake of King Kong and loses no time in becoming a full copy, parody, tribute, and wreckage, concluding with the giant ape dying a horrible death of mixed gunfire and raging flames, 1:16:00 through the conclusion of the film.
Now, Voyager
Now, Voyager. Irving Rapper, 1942.
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Edition screened: Warner DVD, released 2001. English language. Runtime approximately 117 minutes.
Summary: No particular depictions of violence or harm to animals.
Nude on the Moon
Nude on the Moon. Doris Wishman and Raymond Phelan (as O.O. Miller and Anthony Brooks), 1960.
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Edition screened: Included on Something Weird 2-DVD set Nude on the Moon/Blaze Starr Goes Nudist, released 2006. Also included in The Films of Doris Wishman: The Daylight Years. English language. Runtime approximately 70 minutes.
Summary: No particular depictions of violence or harm to animals.
This uninteresting drama of self-financed space exploration lands our two scientists in a topless colony for chubby women, seemingly filmed at an all-inclusive alligator farm in Florida. When this dreary viewing experience finally is over, a ridiculous 6-minute outtake from the Muppet Show called “Moon Strips” (1960, Walter Hart) has the nerve to auto-start.
Nymphomaniac,Volumes I & II: Extended Director’s Cut
Nymphomaniac,Volumes I & II. Lars von Trier, 2013.
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Edition screened: Magnolia Extended Director’s Cut 2-Blu-ray set, released 2014. Combined runtime approximately 327 minutes (Volume 1 slightly over 148 minutes; Volume II slightly over 178 minutes).
Summary: A gazelle dies in a leopard’s mouth; a cow is killed by the meat industry.
Details:
1) Volume 1: A leopard holds a gazelle by the throat until dead, 2:16:10-2:16:20. Same footage used again, 2:22:45-2:22:50.
2) Volume 2: A cow is killed with a bolt gun and we see the beginning of its death throes, 1:41:16-1:41:22.
I first watched the short 240-minute version of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac in 2014, and did not revisit it until watching the Extended Director’s Cut nearly a decade later. A dramatically expanded viewing experience was provided, due not so much to the nearly 90 minutes of additional material, but more to my consideration and rewatching of other LvT films since then. I think I got Nympho this time, or at least did not miss it as egregiously.
While Nymphomaniac includes whispers as old as 1994’s The Kingdom, it really walks hand-in-hand with its immediate predecessors, Antichrist (2009) and Melancholia (2011), in ways both more and less difficult, more and less judgmental, than either of those films.
On the lightest side, Nymphomaniac includes a D.S. al coda to John Hurt’s bawdy 18th-century joke about spoons at Melancholia’s wedding reception, explaining the humor clearly this time. We also are teased by a scene of a toddler climbing out of his crib on a snowy evening, almost an outtake from Antichrist.
But like those earlier LvT films and some best works by Antonioni or Bergman, Nympho’s main discussion is the place - or impracticality of place - for overeducated, bored westerners in the contemporary world. Stellan Skarsgård and Charlotte Gainsbourg swap the spotlight for monologues throughout the film. She tells graphic stories of her life filled with extreme and violent sexual acts. He then explains that each of her vignettes parallels some aspect of learned culture, pontifications that include J.S. Bach’s alignment with the Fibonacci sequence, symbolism in Eastern Orthodox painted icons, and details about diamond cutting.
Inconsistency between Gainsbourg’s formal education and her intuitive understanding is pointed and fascinating. She understands the cantus firmus of polyphonic composition but has not heard of Edgar Allan Poe. At age fifteen she sits in boredom while her older boyfriend struggles to start his motorcycle, then she silently turns on the fuel petcock and leaves. But thirty years later and after a career in organized crime, she does not understand that the slide of a pistol must be racked before it will fire, a whoopsie that leaves her badly beaten and near death. These inconsistencies are not problems or holes with the film’s writing. They are lessons in complicated writing.
I love the subtlety with which von Trier portrays the fuel petcock scene. It is over in a second, with no commentary or particular focus from the camera. A viewer lacking knowledge of engines might think she is simply wiping a smudge of dirt. This filming technique is a weapon that von Trier wields with deadly precision, but also the same gun he uses to shoot himself in the foot. That one vague second, probably missed or dismissed by most viewers, encapsulates the film’s entire theme, that our formal knowledge and self-knowledge are commingled deceptions, perhaps life-saving, perhaps only good as parlor decorations.
Antichrist is such a complicated mesh of commentary about learning, therapy, lies, abuse, and man’s place in the world, that it nearly is impossible to discuss one isolated strand. Yet I will, because in all my reading about that film, I have seen no mention of the single second that exposes the whole. It is too quick, too subtle, and comes too late for an exhausted audience. Antichrist’s incomparable opening is overwhelming with symbolic objects and eroticism. But to describe the mere plot in one sentence, a child falls to his death from a window because his parents are inattentive while having sex. The remainder of the film addresses concepts of education, magic, abuse, and empowerment. Near the end is a quick return to the opening scene, but these moments we have seen before now also include a quick flicker of comprehension from Gainsbourg as she realizes her son’s situation. And she chooses to do nothing. All the subsequent discussion, grief, accusations, therapy, and revelations are lies. (It is worth a side note that in Nymphomaniac, mother Gainsbourg again elects to say goodbye forever to her toddler son rather than skipping one night’s sexual rendezvous.)
Similarly, now after nearly a decade of public examination and outrage about Nymphomaniac, I see no mention of the quick inclusion that illuminates the whole. Early in the film we get a detail of the cat flap in Skarsgård’s small apartment, swinging slightly for no reason. He explains that air pressure causes this when the main door of the lobby is opened. For nearly five-and-a half hours we hear Gainsbourg describe herself as a horrible person, and Skarsgård always contradicts: There are reasons beyond her control, there are sympathetic explanations, there are classical models. She is a good person and all people are good people at heart who should be forgiven. This rationalizing stops when she mentions a “celibate pedophile” she once met. She respected that man for denying his urges for his entire life. The man never approached a child or anyone else, never harmed or loved anyone, choosing to live a sad and cloistered life for the benefit of others. This is the only tale of Gainsbourg’s, the only human specimen, that angers Skarsgård. He will not tolerate a pedophilic impulse, even inactive, and refuses to consider how that man chose to suffer rather than risking harm to others. This human alone he will not forgive.
A flashback shows how Gainsbourg’s celibate pedophile’s secret was uncovered: He was visibly aroused by the mention of a child’s playground. As Gainsbourg retells the story and mentions the playground, we see Skarsgård vividly imagine the rusted chains of a child’s swing, squeaking as the swing gently sways.
Nymphomaniac ends tragically of course, and one of the final images is an image of the cat flap moving as Gainsbourg leaves the building. The slightly swinging little door is accompanied by the audio quote of the squeaking rusted chains of the child’s swing. Kapow, as they say. Over-educated sexless Skarsgård and over-sexed ineducable Gainsbourg are the same. Each is the only person undeserving of self-forgiveness or compassion.
Olga Triple Feature
Olga Triple Feature. Joseph P. Mawra, 1964-1969.
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Edition screened: Something Weird/Image DVD, released 2011. English language. Cumulative runtime approximately 202 minutes.
Summary: No animals or references to animals in the film.
The Olga Triple Feature “An Unspeakable Nightmare of Eroticism” includes several short bonuses and three films by Mawra from his Olga series:
• Olga’s House of Shame (1964, 70 minutes) in which girls loosely tie other girls to trees or chairs then gently pantomime beating or whipping them. 1.5/5❤
• White Slaves of Chinatown (1964, 72 minutes), vignettes of light physical abuse to indoctrinate girls into “the syndicate”. Generic exterior shots of NYC’s Chinatown are fun at first but get old quickly. 2/5❤
• Olga’s Dance Hall Girls (1969, 60 minutes) would be a complete bust without extended - very extended - shots of one girl’s beautiful face. 1/5❤
The Piano Teacher (Haneke)
The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste). Michael Haneke, 2001.
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Edition screened: Criterion Blu-ray #894, released 2017. French language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 130 minutes.
Summary: No depictions of violence or harm to animals.
The Psychopath
The Psychopath. Freddie Francis, 1966.
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Edition screened: Kino Lorber Blu-ray, released 2018. English language. Runtime approximately 82 minutes.
Summary: No depictions of violence or harm to animals.
Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama
Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama. David DeCoteau, 1988.
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Edition screened: Full Moon Blu-ray, released 2016. English language. Runtime approximately 80 minutes.
Summary: No depictions of violence or harm to animals. No animals in the film.
This film is set primarily in the bowling alley of a shopping mall, after hours, and the central half of the film takes place in the unilluminated video arcade of that closed bowling alley. Several pinball machines are scattered among the video games, but there are no legible views of backglasses or side art. Around the 28-minute mark we get to see Linnea Quigley attempt to pry open a coin door.
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