Alas, we bid farewell, as the Prince of Darkness has finally taken his throne in Hell. Ozzy Osbourne, who probably should have died in 2003 after being crushed by his quad bike, or in 1978 when he challenged David Lee Roth to a cocaine duel, or during his self-reported “40-year bender” that lasted until he got sober around 2018, has died.
What is Canadian cinema? I mean, outside of “the King of Venereal Horror” David Cronenberg (who’s been covered on this site 11 times). James Cameron is a Canuck, though he’s spent his whole career making flicks in the U.S. of A. Denis Villeneuve, though now more associated with Hollywood, started his career directing films in his native Quebec. Then there are people I sort of, kind of, don’t actually know, like Guy Maddin and François Girard (both with films in the Criterion Collection), and of course today’s filmmaker, “the King of Emotional Alienation” (my newly coined nickname for him), Atom Egoyan.
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.”
