11/12/6 - 11/21/6

christopher funderburg

In October 2006, Funderburg and Cribbs set out to watch at least 200 movies over the course of the next 200 days. They both watched a different slate of films and wrote about every single one; from epic high art masterpieces such as all ten parts of Kieslowski's Decalogue to instantly forgettable Hollywood crap du jour like A Perfect Stranger to cult classics like Sam Fuller's White Dog. In sections spanning 10 days at a time, The Pink Smoke is reprinting their writings about the grueling experiment in cinematic endurance.

<<click here for 11/2/6 - 11/11/6>>

11.12. School of the Flesh.

(vhs) tv in my apartment. I believe it is an "Hitachi."

This movie is apparently based on a work by Yukio Mishima, but it's one of those updates that modernizes the text so completely that it bears no resemblance (even in spirit) to the source material. Strangely, though, this movie did keep on reminding me of other (better) works. First off, I couldn't believe it was by the same director (Benoit Jacques) who made the pretty excellent A Single Girl with Virginie Ledoyen and the at-least-decent A Tout de Suite. In all three films, he frames the majority of the shots in close-up and that was really about the only connection I could draw. It's not as shocking as when I saw Antonioni's jaw-dropping Mystery of Oberwald earlier this year, but it's still comparable to the feeling I had then of "there's just no way this is the same director who made Deserto Rosso and L'Eclisse."

Secondly, there are several small harmonic convergences which reminded me of The Comedy of Power. Most obviously, Isabelle Huppert is the star of both films, but she also shares a couple good scenes with Francois Berleand in each film. In Comedy of Power, Berleand plays a corporate no-goodnik with allergy problems and he makes a big impression in a small amount of screen time. Here, he has on of the more agreeably suggestive roles (in a film full of underwritten characters) and his interplay with Huppert is once again very enjoyable. Also, in both Comedy of Power and School of the Flesh, Huppert eats sushi with chopsticks. I only noticed because she has a really awkward motion while doing it and I found it distracting in both films. I would believe it if you told me she never used chopsticks, except for filming those two scenes.

Finally, what this film really, truly reminded me of was The Piano Teacher because of their shared thematic/plot concerns: both are about the shifty sado-masochistic elements in a relationship between a repressed older woman and a virile, cocky young man. School of the Flesh is the far, far inferior film – I actually don't even have that much to say about it because it isn't worth anyone's time. The main problem is the casting of the hunky young bi-sexual hustler who draws Huppert into a web of seduction, deceit, degradation and other sundry emotional interactions. The dude they cast looks kind of like a pussy. I know he's supposed to have a bit of a gay streak, but he's also supposed to be a kick-boxer and several characters mention how dangerously violent he is. The dude they cast looks like he would get the crap kicked out of him by a husky 12 year-old or one of those female basketball players they have nowadays. He's kind of good-looking, but also has that soft goofiness that a lot of male models have. Compared to Benoit Magimel's effortlessly masculine character in The Piano Teacher, he's totally miscast.

Ok, really, here's the last thing I'll say and it's totally indicative of the failings of this film: the whole thing (Huppert and the wimp's relationship, the plot, the whole movie) is predicated upon their sex-life. And they first time they get it on, the film cuts away before they even kiss. It cuts to him asleep in bed the next morning and her dressing beside the bed. What kind of bullshit is that? Imagine The Piano Teacher if it cut away right before Huppert and Magimel's scene in the bathroom. Don't waste my time, movie.

 

11.13. The Piano Teacher.

(dvd) the tv in my apartment.

Don’t read this unless you have already seen The Piano Teacher.

At the very end of the film, there is a moment where Isabelle Huppert sees Benoit Magimel at a concert. They exchange pleasantries and are civil to each other, as if nothing has happened. As Magimel enters the concert hall, Huppert lingers outside. The look on her face at that moment is the totality of that film: it is the essential moment of the artwork and all of the material around it is merely a structure designed to bear that moment, to support its full weight and its complexities. Of course, this means that the entirety of the film is predicated on Huppert’s performance, specifically on the expressivity of her face. Beyond the film’s textual meaning, Huppert’s performance adds a layer of complexity that is essentially cinematic: the look on her face could only be conveyed by the look on her face.

That’s a strange thing to realize because the film is based on a novel – I actually went out and bought Elfriede Jelinek’s source work after watching the film again because I was curious how this moment possibly could’ve been handled.  To use words to describe that expression would only have the effect of dissolving its ambiguity ("she made this expression," "she felt this way," etc.); or, possibly worse, to create a deliberate and mannered irony ("her expression was both happy and sad, anxious and relieved, full of both longing and revulsion"). Moreover, what makes it furthermore essentially cinematic, is that it is a moment in time and this single image in isolation (as in, say, a painting or photography) would have an impossibly wide-open meaning. Too many stories could be constructed by the viewer to accompany the image when in isolation, the deeper psychological meaning would obviously be lost.

In all this, we see that what makes the moment so essentially cinematic is how it ultimately plays out for the viewer. You cannot tell what she is feeling, what is going through her mind, and the delicate richness of her face – the watery edges of her eyes, the trembling of her jaw, the queasy splotches of her freckles, the paleness of her skin, the beautiful lines of her aging face, that total ambiguity of her expression – creates a deliberate counterpoint to the certainty and violence of her final gesture. We know she stabs herself in the chest, but the counterpoint of uncertainty/certainty achieves the effect of a true irony and prevents us from arriving at a simple conclusion, a pat bit of "psychoanalysis" (or worse, "morality") that renders the messy edges clean and painful honesty insincere. For me, it is the moment that defines acting for cinema.

 

11.14.06. Venus.

(35mm) tech screening at the Jacob Burns Film Center.

Sometimes looks aren’t deceiving: what appears to be another entry in the “crusty old man unexpectedly finds something worth living for and imparts life lessons to a youngster” genre is just that. Peter O’Toole plays a decaying former big-shot Shakespearian thespian who toddles about with his friends, now relegated to playing bit parts in tv shows (such as a dying grandfather) and taking boatloads of pills to stave off the inevitable. He’s lonely and all his friends are dying and he sometimes wonders “what’s the point in going on at all?” Enter the young niece (or niece’s daughter? something like that) of his best friend who is supposed to act as a nurse ("only without the uniform") to the fussy oldster. She’s beautiful, but coarse, shallow and standoffish. Could something in her beauty trigger a new-found zest for life in Peter O’Toole? Does his curmudgeon have some life wisdom that will transform her from an ambition-deficient tart into a decent human being? Will he introduce her to a world of classical painting and poetry that forever changes her perspective? The answers are “yes.”

Fortunately, writer Hanif Kureshi and O’Toole are both talented enough that the film is consistently likable and never fits the profile of that genre of maudlin, cloying crap to which it really belongs. Solid performances and understated melodrama mask its true nature. At least until the very end. Director Roger Michell puts some twinkle-y music over the final scenes and a syrupy pop song over the end credits and it basically plays its hand at that moment: those choices reveal the film for what it really is. Another irritating element is that it’s also a bit of a Shakespeare reclamation project – it wants to expose the timeless humanity of his verse and its contemporary relevance. Even that works better than it should. The “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” poem actually made sense to me for the first time in Venus and the scene where Peter O’Toole recites it is probably the best scene in the film. But still, making an actor who endlessly quotes Shakespeare your main character is an obstacle that almost no film can overcome.

In addition, one of the climatic scenes involves O’Toole having an epiphany on the beach. The beach location used appeared to be the same location used for the late-film epiphany in All or Nothing. Maybe a lot of England’s beaches look that way, but the connection (and attendant negative comparison) to All or Nothing shocked me out of a trance: Venus is not a good movie and no amount of cagey dialog, understatement, great acting and sincerity can make it anything other than a predictable piece of middle-brow sentimentality.

 

11.15. Shadow Company.

(digibeta) public screening at the JBFC.

Said Thom Powers, head of the selection committee for documentary films at the Toronto Film Festival, about Shadow Company: “There’s just something wrong with that film.” I know exactly what he means and it took me a lot of thought to figure exactly just what was wrong with Shadow Company. It’s a documentary that examines the world of mercenary soldiers or, as they are now called, “private military contractors.” Normally, you would expect a documentary about these guys, the ones who go into the Ivory Coast to help protect the Nestle's slave trade or into Burma to protect the natural gas pipelines, would not be particularly sympathetic. In fact, there are few villains as readily identifiable as soldiers who can be paid to kill regardless of any ideology or human cost; the word “mercenary” itself has inescapably negative connotations.

What makes the perspective of this film confusing is that it follows that script to a certain extent: it is thoughtful and somewhat critical of the larger culture in which mercenaries exist. It traces the roots of the first large, organized mercenary groups back to medieval Holland and then looks at how they now frequently operate in totally lawless/unstable areas where there are virtually no repercussions for their actions. Even the U.S. military will theoretically court martial its own soldiers for indiscriminately killing civilians, but who would theoretically rebuke mercenaries for doing so in a largely lawless situation like civil war-torn Somalia or Cameroon? So, the film doesn’t flinch from these questions but what’s up with that sentimental music playing over the shots of one mercenary’s wife back in the U.S.? What’s with all of these fetish shots of guns being discharged and armored vehicles zooming around rubble-strewn streets? Do we really need melodramatic, epistolary-style voice-over in the form of a fictional private military contractor writing to home?

What’s strange about Shadow Company is that it suffers from a kind of cognitive dissonance: it doesn’t pull any punches about the ugly underbelly of this world, but it still clearly identifies with the contractors. Maybe this is because of the fact that most of the contractors are former soldiers and the “rah, rah, support the troops at any cost!” mentality has reached such hyperbolic proportions that one is supposed to support them even when they are shooting destitute brown people in the head by the dozens at the behest of DeBeers and Total (instead of just the behest Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle). More likely, the filmmakers just come from that world in some way – they seem pretty chummy with all of the private military contractors, war profiteers, and human rights violators on display in the film. They probably have some background with the PMC’s – maybe they were arms dealers who decided to get into filmmaking? Maybe there’s an underlying cynicism: well, somebody will always be willing to do these things.

Still it’s ultimately a very even-handed look at what’s actually going on and the statistics are more than faintly upsetting. The film gives a very palpable sense of how some of these mercenary groups, like Blackwater, could easily become more powerful than the U.S. military in a matter of a decade or two. They’re already better equipped, better financed, and increasingly crucial to large-scale military operations such as the occupation of Iraq; these guys aren’t just sitting in the Green Zone chauffeuring dignitaries to meetings with oil companies. So it comes back to cognitive dissonance: the film makes a very convincing, well-reasoned case about how and why these companies are so scary and dangerous and just fucking ruthless and amoral and then proceeds to ask the audience to weep over their hired goons’ lack of access to good movies (seriously, there’s a whole scene about the process of renting movies) and their long stays overseas away from their wives and families. What is wrong with the filmmakers’ brains that they can’t understand how perverse it all is?

 

11.16. They Live.

(35mm) Anthology Film Archive.

A year or two ago, I had a chance to see a 35mm print of They Live at the Walter Reade, but I inexplicably missed it. It was like that time Mr. T. was going to be signing autographs at the mall. I kept saying, “I’ll go later. I’ll go later,” and when I finally got there, he had just left. I asked the mall guy if he thought he’d ever be back and he said he didn’t know. Well, never again! This is John Carpenter’s classic yarn of a down and out construction worker (the estimable Rowdy Roddy Piper) who learns of an intergalactic conspiracy to enslave humanity under the rule of skull-faced aliens who pose as yuppies and put subliminal messages in our billboards and magazines that say things like “submit” and “this is your god” (on the back of a twenty dollar bill). A radical church gets their hands on some special Ray-Bans that allow Piper to see the yuppies in all their grotesque, slimey-faced glory and he immediately springs into action to bring down the greedy, revolting creeps.

It’s the type of film that when you’re sixteen years old and really into the Dead Kennedys, you see it and then immediately want to go shoot up a bank and tear down billboards and elbow-drop guys with expensive watches. In other words, it’s awesome. Piper is surprisingly fantastic as John Nada and all he has on his side is the church and a bunch of other victims of the system who are ready to kick ass and chew bubble gum. And they’re all out of bubble gum. This time I thought about the underlying politics of the film’s most famous scene, in which Piper and Keith David engage their considerable physical statures in a hellacious eight-minute, bare-knuckle, drag-down, knock-out, back-alley free-for-all. It’s a notorious scene that’s 100% worthy of the hype (Trey Parker even modeled the infamous “cripple fight” in “South Park” on it).

But what struck me this time is that the battle is not between Piper and some skull-faced creepazoids, but his otherwise sympathetic cohort David – the largest and most trying resistance Piper faces is that David refuses to put on the damn glasses! Not to label my personal politics, but that’s a pretty nice metaphor for what I’ve always felt as an anti-“rich assholes” partisan: the toughest resistance you face to your ideas will be from the blue-collar and middle-class folks who simply refuse to look at the facts; the people who would benefit most from even the simplest policy changes are the ones you have to drag kicking and screaming into discussions of class, race, or social justice. It’s not the yuppies or the stock brokers who want to ignore the realities of a capitalist system – they’re the motherfuckers engineering it! No, the folks who get the raw deals don’t even want to admit there’s a problem. Anyway, for a film reasonably accused of being heavy-handed, it adds a nice layer of complexity.

I’ve often thought about Carpenter’s politics and he’s a tough one to figure out. On the one hand, this film seems like it couldn’t be more liberal: yuppies are evil aliens. But I’ve read enough interviews with him to know he doesn’t consider himself a liberal and is somewhat of a flag-waving, U.S. military, John Wayne morality kinda guy. He’s contradictory; in fact, I one read an interview where he negatively compared the famously-liberal Ted Turner to the icon of conservatism, Ronald Reagan - which is mind-boggling. Carpenter’s point was that they both trade in a nostalgia for an age that never existed and ultimately are both only interested in profiteering through that nostalgia. I think They Live is even more interesting when viewed through this kind of lens: not as an exploitation of liberal hysteria, but as a statement about why those on the bottom stand up for real values like human decency and Bubble Yum, how they revolt against the raging forces of greed. Maybe Carpenter understands even better than Godard exactly whom are the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.

 

11.17. The Toxic Avenger, Part II.

(dvd) my apartment. My dog was really agitated the whole time and kept barking at the screen.

The book that James Gunn ghost-wrote for Lloyd Kaufman, Everything I Needed to Know about Filmmaking I Learned by Making 'The Toxic Avenger,' is probably the funniest book ever written. I'm not even sure what would be in the spot for runner-up because there's really no comparison in terms of sheer comedic greatness. It's really brilliant in a lot of ways and I've read it cover to cover at least six or seven times total – it's just a great book to pick up and flip through, pick out anecdotes here and there and read the sidebars and the reviews in the back. Because I like this book so much, folks are under the impression that I must like Troma’s movies and this last weekend a guy I know gave me a copy of something called "The Tox Box." It includes the first three Toxic Avenger films and a fourth disk with the feature length pilot of the "Toxic Crusaders" cartoon.

It was a reasonable gesture, but the ugly truth is that I have never enjoyed a single Troma film - I found the original Toxic Avenger so painful to sit through that I never bothered to see any of the sequels. And by painful, I don’t mean I found it too gross or puerile or stomach-churningly violent: I found it painfully boring and amateurish, cruddy-looking and poorly edited, both too dumb and too clever. Being given the box-set was just enough impetus to give the most famous Troma franchise another chance. Who knows, maybe one of them is accidentally watchable? From having read the book, I knew that the second and third Toxie films were actually shot as one film but then divided into two separate films because of an enormous initial running time, a la Kill Bill.

And golly day, does it feel that way. There's a wisp of a plot awkwardly drawn out to feature length, a hugely anti-climactic final sequence, and piles upon piles of highly expositional, extremely irritating voice-over. That fucking retarded voice-over is the worst thing about the film and demonstrative of Kaufman’s failings as a director. It's a bit of technical stupidity that repeats itself endlessly throughout the film: narration explaining what's going to happen in the next scene an awkward pause the next scene begins slowly the scene unfolds in the manner is which it was described by the voice-over. And it's not exactly a fucking complicated plot that needs expository support. The whole thing is so poorly directed/conceptualized/executed that I just have no excuse for it. It sucks. Kaufman is also the master of the sequence that drags on and on and on The film actually consists of four main chunks: a shootout/fistfight at a home for the blind, the Toxic Avenger wandering around Japan, a fight with a bunch of Japanese baddies, and a car chase.

Theoretically, three of these sequences are action sequences and should therefore be very exciting – isn't the phrase "extended action sequence" basically just code for "really awesome shit?" Some other "extended action sequences" include: the airstrip fight in Raiders, the bank heist in Heat, the Piper/David fisticuffs in They Live, even the end of The Wild Bunch counts. So why was I praying that Toxie 2's action sequences would end? Why did I want them to mercifully come to a close? Because Lloyd Kaufman, while a very nice man with great politics and taste in pop culture and someone for whom I have the utmost respect, couldn't direct his way through an episode of "Charles in Charge." I don't get it; the book is great, but I guess after Slither and the Dawn of the Dead remake, I should just come to terms with the fact that it's James Gunn whose work I enjoy and not Lloyd Kaufman's.

 

11.18. One False Move.

(vhs) my apartment.

I originally sat down to watch a copy of Hardware that was loaned to me by one Allen Cordell, but the tape wouldn’t play in my VCR. To make sure it was a problem with the tape and not my VCR, I threw in the nearest other movie handy - which happened to be One False Move - and I just ended up watching it all the way through. This movie is totally riveting, every time. It’s a kind of masterpiece of understatement – the script is great (written by Billy Bob Thornton and his writing partner Tom Epperson) and the intense machinations of the plot are perfectly designed - but it’s still the type of thing which could be ruined with too heavy a touch. In a way, it’s the essential b-movie: if the filmmakers had more time to go nuts with stylistics and wring everything out of the little moments, it could just so easily descend into melodrama or grotesquery. It's sensitive when it could be cheesy and unbearably tense when it could be contrived.

The plot follows a pair of genuinely disturbing killers and their girl (played by a never-scuzzier Thornton, a high-waist pants wearing Michael Beach, and a "how come her career never caught on?" Cynda Williams, who rip off a drug dealer for "enough drugs to last [them] until 1995!" Their story is intercut with the story of an overly enthusiastic small-town sheriff played by Bill Paxton. The trio of killers set off from L.A. to Star City, Arkansas, the town where Billy Bob and Cynda grew up and where Paxton happens to be the sheriff. Some big city cops from L.A. head out to Star City to assist Paxton in the investigation and it becomes rapidly clear that Paxton is an unfortunate mix of being over-eager (to nail the creeps!) and dangerously inexperienced. The whole thing reeks of disaster before several late film revelations really put Paxton in a terrible position.

It’s interesting how the interaction between Paxton and the L.A. cops plays out – they are a touch condescending, but they’re also right: Paxton’s small-town savvy and thirst for heroics are much more likely to get him into trouble than to actually help apprehend the extremely dangerous criminals. The criminals themselves could be easily be played as cartoon-ish uber-villians, but instead there’s a pathetic sense of tragedy – they don't commit crimes because of some devilish thirst for blood and violence, but because they’re scared, illogical, and amoral. It doesn't help that they're frequently high on drugs and impatient to the point of stupidity. The film opens with a triple homicide of folks who seem to be Cynda’s friends and the whole set-up absolutely has the contradictory feel of a true crime novel: the killers want to eliminate any witnesses, but they park in plain view in front of the house and they leave a mess of evidence everywhere. By the end of the film, you want Paxton to be able to step up and be a hero, but you also know the film has the guts and the brains to play out the story with a sense of realism that means all bets are off.

 

11.19. Un Chien Andalou.

(vertical helical scan, taped off tv) tv in my apartment.

Back when I lived in Chester County, Pennsylvania there was this weird UHF station that showed movies uncut and without commercials and didn’t really play too many normal tv shows. It was called “Channel 48: The Good Television Network.” I’ve thought about this channel from time to time because, in retrospect, it’s such a bizarre thing – I started to really carefully watch their listings in maybe the 10th grade because they showed a bunch of obscure Wuxia Pian movies like Master of the Flying Guillotine and The One-Armed Swordsman. But it’s also the place where I first saw a lot of the canon of art films; I can remember seeing Last Year and Marienbad, Hiroshima Mon Amour, and The Seven Samurai for the first time on WGTW.

Anyway, I taped a lot of stuff off of it and this copy of Un Chien Andalou (on a tape with Fritz Lang's M) was one of my most prized possessions. Just think for a moment about how difficult it was to find a copy of an obscure, out-of-print art film from 1933 with rights issues back before the internet made obtaining rare materials easy. You couldn't just stroll down to a local video store and have Blockbuster order you a copy, stuff from the Facets catalogue was always expensive, and nobody I knew had even heard of it (let alone had their own copy they’d let me borrow). I watched this tape so much that it’s now pretty static-y, but as a matter of principle I’ve never bought another version. For me, the only version of Un Chien Andalou that exists is the one that I taped from a late-night screening off of Channel 48.

There's no point in really talking too deeply about the film – it's in and of itself a primer in Surrealism and probably the most essential straight-up high art film ever created and I don't want really to give the only kind of cursory, bullshit overview of it that would be possible in a paragraph or two.  My favorite scene continues to be when the Pierre Batcheff is looking out the window and rubbing his hands, getting aroused at the impending traffic accident as a series of cars nearly miss squishing a comely pedestrian. It’s such a great little perverse scene and emblematic of Bunuel’s singular strength: the ability to make the disgusting, repulsive and depraved seem universal.

I know Dali is the "co-director" of this film, but I've never been too into his stuff and in every interview I've read with him he comes across as a shallow publicity hound and has a mocking tone of intentional pretentiousness (which is probably the only thing more obnoxious than unintentional pretentiousness). What's my point? My point is that while this film is often cordoned off from the rest of Bunuel's career (and there are many conflicting accounts in which either "co-director" claims sole credit for it), I feel like it's perfectly a part of the larger whole. I was also just reading an interview where Bunuel claimed that both of the main actors (Batcheff and the woman whose name I forget) committed suicide; but it's Bunuel, so who the fuck knows if that's true. Another great sequence: the "shrub, armpit, beard" series of double-exposures.  

 

11.20. Diary of a Chambermaid.

(dvd) my apartment.

&

11.21. Viridiana.

(dvd) portable dvd player on train to and from work.

Originally, I was going to write about these two films separately, but after trying, there's really no way to do so. First off, there's the fact that it's very hard to write only a paragraph or so about films which you have a lot to say – draining my thoughts down to the bare minimum seems glib and pointless when discussing a film like Diary of a Chambermaid, a movie I know inside and out. A more general discussion of two Bunuel films seems much more manageable somehow. Secondly, Chambermaid is a very strange companion piece to Viridiana – it's virtually a remake sort of. Certainly, there are numerous overlaps between the two films: plot-wise, an innocent poor woman goes to the countryside to stay with some eccentric rich folks. The innocent woman is only partially able to resist engaging in the strangeness around her. Halfway through each film, a shocking act of violence (in both films the violence occurs off-screen and we are made aware of it by the camera panning to a corpse) disrupts the innocent's decision to leave. The innocent sets off a series of events that lead to what I can only describe as a "mass un-repression."

Also, both films have a major, major, major foot fetish. I know Bunuel is always accused of having a foot fetish, but these two films are really the definitive examples in his filmography. The two stars of the films look very similar, Sylvia Pinal as Viridiana and Jeanne Moreau as the chambermaid both have similar bodies, round faces, and sensuous, heavy lips. They both exude an improbable sexuality, especially when covered up in a dowdy maid’s uniform or a burlap nun’s habit. Both films are obsessed with how repressed emotions/dreams/desires bubble up into our conscious behavior and in both films the Patriarch of the bourgeoisie gently induces the protagonist into a deeply perverse game of fetish dress-up.

For some reason, I was under the impression Chambermaid was made first, but that impression was all wrong (for some reason I thought it was made in 1959). Chambermaid was filmed in 1964 and Viridiana in 1961, so it kind of makes sense that Chambermaid is virtually a remake of Viridiana. Viridiana encountered incredible problems with censorship and was denounced by the Pope himself. Franco suffered a great deal of embarrassment that he had allowed it to be produced in Fascist Spain and, subsequently, Gustavo Alatriste (the film's producer and, I believe, Sylvia Pinal's husband) had the negative buried out on a farm where only the farmers could find it so that the censors couldn’t burn it. Despite winning the Golden Bear in the Venice Film Festival, it wasn’t shown in Spain until 1977 and there was a lengthy legal battle to get it declared to actually be of Mexican origin and, therefore, suitable for international release. I'm not sure when these battles were resolved or when Chambermaid's production actually got underway, but it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which Bunuel thought Viridiana might never see the light of day and decided to recycle a good deal of it. Not that Chambermaid doesn't feel totally like its own movie (and vice versa for Viridiana), but it was very startling to watch them back to back - Viridiana actually feels like the ghost of Chambermaid, a less fleshed-out but still totally haunting experience.

<<click here for 11/22/6 - 12/1/6>>

 

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