Stranger in the Alps

Day of the Outlaw (1959)   "Watch what happens to the women… watch the west explode!"   Man, the western-in-a-snow-landscape genre always has this bleak streak to it, it seems. This kind of under snowed western (pun intended) stars Robert Ryan as Blaise Starett , a coarse cattleman who operates in a small, remote town somewhere in Wyoming. He has a partner named Dan (Nehemiah Persoff ) who is getting jaded with Starett's rough ways, but stays with him because they've been through a lot together, or so is hinted at in the opening. Starett has developed a feud with local farmer Hal Crane (Alan Marshall) over some barbed wire fences and is prepared to kill him for this rather insignificant quarrel. It quickly becomes clear this is not the actual reason he wants Crane out of the way, he has entertained an affair with Crane's wife Helen (Tina Louise) over the past few months and she isn't ready to leave her husband for h...

Fear X (2003) The bastard child in Refn's filmography. The ugly deformed misfit no one likes to speak of, the one they keep locked in the basement, where no daylight can reach it . It's kind of sad how this movie is mostly notorious for being the one that broke Refn's career, put him in an enormous debt and forced him to return to Denmark to make two sequels to his, at that point in his life, most successful movie, Pusher. Many people seem to dislike this movie and I can totally understand that. It is not cool like Drive is. It lacks the manic energy of Bronson. It’s a slow, idiosyncratic movie, that barely has a real plot to speak of. The entire thing reeks of pretentions. It is also 100% my kinda shit.   Just for those of you who have no idea what Fear X is about (which is a lot since not many people have actually taken the time to just sit down and watch it) . The movie revolves around Harry Caine (John Turturro), a security agent wo...

The Beach Bum (2019)     Harmony Korine’s latest is deeply hilarious and seemingly goes nowhere in between. I was actually surprised how much I liked this one considering how it finds most of its humor in showing the sheer decadence of these rich, privileged people. The trailer of the movie suggests that Matthew McConaughey’s Moondog goes on some spiritual journey in an attempt to become a better person, while in fact that couldn’t be further from the truth. Moondog in this movie is a textbook example of someone failing upwards, who learns nothing in the process, does whatever the fuck he wants, and eventually gets rewarded for this. His so-called writing process of creating the next great American novel comes down to him jotting down some words on his typewriter once in a while in between a hangover and his afternoon nap, usually with some cocktail or a massive joint in his other hand.    And his actual poetry is mediocre at best, w...

Sweetie (1989)   Jane Campion's debut film is very much a first-time feature, the transitions between different sequences are a bit clumsy and something about this movie just feels unfinished. But despite all of this, I couldn't stop myself from loving Jane Campion's Sweetie. I adore movies about dysfunctional families, and this is a very great example of that specific subgenre.     We follow Kay, a young woman who is weirdly hang up on superstition, when she starts a relationship with her coworker’s fiancée because the tea leaves have told her so. They move in together and go live in the suburbs, b ut after a year of being together, their relationship reaches an impasse. They're not able to have sex together anymore and Kay doesn't even want to sleep in the same bed. But one day, Sweetie, Kay's unstable sister, crashes into their house and starts wrecking the monotonous homelife they got so accustomed to.       Sweet...

Never Look Away (2018) Never Look Away has an interesting view of politics and art and how the two relate to each other. But not in terms of the currently very popular debate about the politics in the art itself, yet rather about creating art in a specific political environment (at first Nazi Germany, later the DDR). The movie opens in 193 7 , when are lead character, Kurt, is still a little boy. He goes to visit a modern art exhibition with his rather open-minded aunt. The museum guide gives a lengthy speech about the impurity of this certain art movement, how it is at conflict with the traditional German values and even goes as far as suggesting that this kind of work can only come from someone with a disturbed mind, and therefore it’s the government’s job to take measures. It’s already clear, art can only suffice in this world as a form of propaganda, while also giving us a little hint of what will further happen to this family unit.   In the fi...