movies

Last week was a great week for the movies. I saw The Big Sleep, Key Largo, Band of Angels, Badlands, Nothing Sacred and l’Autre. Band of Angels is a curious film about a white woman who discovers that she has a black mother and so is sold into slavery—to none other than Clark Gable. Clark Gable is one of those kind slave masters; there were many very disconcerting scenes where masses of slaves follow him around singing gospel songs. Hollywood has a long history of handling race relations indelicately, crudely, and often tastelessly (and this is a trait that I would argue we still see, in movies like Crash—not the Cronenberg film). Anyway, the film has very offensive moments, but I’m not sure what the whole thing adds up to.

Badlands was the highlight. Seeing it on film, even if the print was a little scratchy, was infinitely better than seeing it on DVD. I realized how carefully composed every frame is. Terrence Malick uses Carl Orff’s piece ‘Gassenhauer’ throughout the film (this was before True Romance, I should add): one sequence with this music, I think at any rate, is easily one of the best sequences in film history.