Aguirre, The Wrath of God

There's something a bit odd about a movie where Spanish people speak German, but I guess the same can be said about any number of movies where people speak English when they shouldn't. Aguirre tells the story of a man who leads a group of explorers as they search for El Dorado in South America. Their mission is only supposed to last a week when they leave the main group, but Aguirre rebels against the chosen leader, believing greatness can sometimes only be found if certain orders are disobeyed, and elects a new leader, even declaring him the new king, and they continue looking for the city of gold. Of course they never find it, and the rest of the film consists of them all becoming increasingly desperate and deluded as they slowly get picked off by natives while their supplies dwindle to nothing. It's a pretty harsh movie, though there's a certain watchability to seeing the whole crew succumb to madness and starvation.

I've seen the name Werner Herzog come up a lot, and this being his first film I've seen, I have to say I'm fairly impressed. He obviously didn't have a very large budget to work with, given how the quality of the picture and the costumes definitely comes off a bit cheap. But he still makes the story work, and somehow pulled a really compelling and interesting story out of a bunch of guys riding a raft for an hour and a half. Watching Aguirre bully his compatriots into following him to their collective doom becomes very unnerving, and there's a constant noticeable trend to the feel of the atmosphere as things go from adventurous to worrying and then far, far worse. It's also an oddly funny movie too at times, notably with all the dialogue that pops up whenever a delirious person gets hit by an arrow from an unseen assailant in the jungle. A solid film that far outshines its limited production value.

Sansho the Bailiff

Sansho the Bailiff plays a lot like a classic Shakespearean tragedy, and there's definitely a sadness and poignancy to the film. I can't say it really drew me into its story too much, but that's partly my fault for not giving it my full attention. I just don't always go for this kind of story, which seems to be trying a little too hard at times to be depressing for its own sake. Not that trying to get any sort of particular emotion out of the viewer is wrong, it's just not generally my cup of tea. It's still an obviously well done film, made perhaps a bit early to have some of the real stylistic touches that get me interested, but still good.

I wasn't really sure why it was called what it was. Sansho is a major character, but the movie is really about two siblings that get captured after their noble father is ousted and sold into slavery. They spend years toiling and trying to get back to their family, but as can be expected nothing goes as well as the protagonists hope it will. There are some solid melodramatic performances, and truly bitter moments of sadness. I just didn't find myself caring as much as director Kenji Mizoguchi wanted me to. There's not much more I can say than that.

Spartacus: Gods of the Arena

Gods of the Arena is a prequel miniseries to last year's Spartacus: Blood and Sand that only exists because star Andy Whitfield was diagnosed with cancer and unable to play the part in season two. Based on that sentence you might think that it was doomed to be terrible, but I actually enjoyed it quite a lot. It had all the qualities that the regular series had found in its second half with none of the horrible growing pains from the first, and managed to tell an interesting swords-and-sandals tale while also filling in some unasked for yet still intriguing details about the lives of many of the show's characters years before they met its titular character. Maybe it didn't strictly need to exist, since they ended up having to recast Spartacus despite taking the year hiatus, but that doesn't mean it wasn't fun.

Five years before Spartacus showed up, the arena was ruled by another man named Gannicus. Batiatus still controlled the gladiators, but was watched by his overbearing father, and still trying to prove himself in the arena, long before he had political ambitions. Lucretia was less of a party girl, Doctore wasn't Doctore yet, and Ashur and Crixus were just untested recruits. Watching everybody slowly turn into the people they would be later is fairly compelling, and a lot of times the real explanation for something is more surprising than you might guess. It all fits together a bit too cleanly to feel like a truly organic story, but there's nothing wrong with tightly plotted action and intrigue. Also, there's lots of extremely bloody and stylish fight scenes and needlessly explicit nudity, which is just as fun to watch as it was before.

Not every little plot thread is as interesting as the others. A few characters feel a bit wasted, and a few things we probably didn't really need to know. But the writers and crew have honed the show's formula to a well oiled machine by this point, which actually makes me almost disappointed that that formula's probably going to be gone by the time the show comes back considering what has happened. Still, I'm definitely looking forward to what comes next. That's something I honestly wouldn't have guessed when the show started a year ago.

Also, here are my recaps for all the episodes of the show:
Past Transgressions
Missio
Paterfamilias
Beneath the Mask
Reckoning
The Bitter End

Satantango

This is one of the hardest movies I've ever had to try to have an opinion on. Satantango is seven hours long, which makes it the seventh longest non-experimental film of the last 20 years according to Wikipedia. It is composed entirely of long takes, and not just regular long takes, long takes that last for minutes at a time regularly. Not a whole lot happens in those seven hours, despite the fact that several events take place off screen and are described by a narrator or just implied. The story has an obvious ambition to it, although to be honest I'd have a hard time describing to you what it actually is about. It's easy to lose focus when the characters are speaking Hungarian, or not at all for minutes on end. This all sounds like a painfully boring experience, but somehow it wasn't. Part of it might be that I watched it in three chunks thanks to getting the discs separately from Netflix instead of one seven hour long sitting.

But there really is something about the movie that makes it compelling despite everything I've described, maybe even partially because of it. It probably could have even lasted longer. Long takes can be used effectively to make a movie seem more real. We can grasp and be entertained by quicker editing techniques, but there are no cuts and camera angles in real life, and watching something happen in real time can be captivating and even hypnotic. There's also just an undeniable artistry to the way director Béla Tarr and his crew painstakingly set up and shoot all of these scenes, somehow finding new ways to show people walking somewhere or sitting in a room that don't get tiring before the film ends. Maybe I'm just searching for a way to explain why I wasn't really bored by an epically long movie about Hungarian farmers screwing each other over, but I really wasn't. Well, maybe I was at times, and I helped stave off those feelings by doing some other stuff during particularly long and wordless moments. But it is pretty amazing how watchable it still ended up being.