Ah, what a fresh breath of Madrileño air. After two laborious trudges through melancholy epics with my last two picks, it’s refreshing to return to something light… if you consider a certified psychopath kidnapping a former porn star “light.”
Between this and Betty Blue, this has been the hardest stretch of Criterion Month so far, two movies I watched back-to-back with a combined runtime of 356 minutes. But at least Betty Blue looked nice, was funny at times, and straightforward. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (they got the ‘Unbearable’ part right) is a slow crawl through dense political machinations.
I love doing Criterion Month here at the blog. I get to watch so many different movies from so many different time periods and regions. I get to look cultured on Letterboxd and at parties (yeah, right, what parties?). But Criterion Month isn’t without its caveats.
In 2023, UCLA conducted a study surveying 1,500 members of Gen Z about sex in the media. Forty-eight percent said that “sex and sexual content is not needed for the plot of most TV shows and movies,” with 51.5 percent wanting to see more content focused on friendships and platonic relationships. Man, what’s happened to sex in cinema?
Ugh, Nazis. I hate those guys. It’s fucking insane that even today those guys have defenders. Why are some people drawn to those fascist dorks? My best guess is that most people hate ambiguity. They want order, with clear rules, a “strong” leader barking commands at them. The problem is they’re willing to overlook the stripping of human rights and murder of others to achieve that “order.”
I’ve seen three Luis Buñuel films now; today’s film, which is about a rich lady who becomes a prostitute, the one with the rich people trapped in a mansion they can’t escape, and the one with the slicing of the eyeball (it is unclear whether or not the eyeball is rich). But considering Buñuel went on to write and direct a film called, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” it’s safe to assume the guy had some thoughts about rich people.
In my neck of the woods, we have a little thing called the “Seattle Freeze.” What this means is that when reacting to out-of-towners, Seattleites are often perceived as cold, detached, and emotionally distant. This phenomenon, if you choose to believe it, is said to have been inherited from Scandinavian settlers, who prefer small, close-knit circles as opposed to 200 friends.
