#18, 2017 Skandies
I remember reading an interesting but catastrophically disorganized book in the 2000s called 1491, which set forth then-recent discoveries that the jungles of the Amazon, long thought to have been a wilderness inhabited by the most primitive of peoples, actually showed signs of having been extensively cultivated for centuries. Evidence also suggested that the nearby Lake Titicaca region had, circa the year 800, been the site of an expansive empire whose capital was larger and more prosperous than any contemporaneous city in western Europe. So, here we have a movie about Percy Fawcett, a British army major sent by the Royal Geographical Society in 1906 to map out the disputed border between Bolivia and Brazil. There he became convinced that Amazonia was home to the remains of a great city, a jungle counterpart to the Andes’ Machu Picchu. He undertook several expeditions to find it between the ages of 39 and 57, but failed to return from his last one in 1925.
I’m interested in history and interested in exploration in particular, so even though this is no great shakes as a narrative, I was still happy to spend a couple of hours watching a re-creation of the life of an explorer. It’s fascinating to see people hopscotching between worlds that are so alien to each other: one day, hacking your way through a steaming jungle full of creatures unknown to Western science, your flesh rotting off you with alarming speed; another day, attending formal meetings of aristocratic organizations, navigating the power hierarchy of the British Empire; then, back in the jungle, this time in an indigenous settlement never visited by Europeans, trying to intuit your way to the proper protocol when one wrong move could get you ritually sacrificed and eaten. It’s a whole lot of different Daseine packed into one Sein.
Kieran Fitzgerald, Steven Hathaway, Molly Rokosz, and Errol Morris, 2017
#17, 2017 Skandies
First point of confusion: this showed up as the #17 movie of the 2017 Skandies, but when I looked for it online, it looked like it was a TV series. It turns out to have been a miniseries that was compiled into a four-hour movie and given a brief theatrical release specifically in order to be eligible for awards like this. Second point of confusion: it starts off as a drama, and then there are some documentary-style talking head segments—but I, Tonya had fake talking-head segments as well, so I was trying to figure out what else I had need one of the actors in for most of the first episode before I realized that, no, this actually was the real guy. Apparently mixing straight documentary with dramatic re-creations is this director’s calling card.
As for the topic: this is about a scientist said to have mysteriously committed suicide in 1953 by jumping out of a hotel window. In 1975, the government admitted that he had been dosed with LSD by the CIA as part of an illegal experiment, leading to a psychological breakdown, and apologized to the family. But it looks as though that apology may be an example of admitting to a lesser crime in order to cover up a greater one: it may be the case that the scientist knew that the U.S. had used biological weapons during the Korean War, had been dosed with LSD as a crude “truth serum”, had been determined to be a security risk, and was therefore just flat-out murdered. And… while interesting in summary, the first ninety minutes of this series didn’t make me want to watch another two and a half hours. Luckily, the episodic format gave me a convenient jumping-off point. Er, no pun intended.
Staying Vertical
Alain Guiraudie, 2016
#15, 2017 Skandies
Oh, I see what happened. I thought, after making it a grand total of nine minutes into this guy’s last movie, why would I put his next one on my list? But this is what I get for falling so far behind. I didn’t watch the “lasted nine minutes” movie until 2020. But I put together this list in 2018. So I didn’t yet know that Alain Guiraudie = “do not watch”. Now I know!
Why is he a “do not watch”, you ask? Well, the protagonist of this movie ends up in the local papers by the end of it. Here’s the headline:
In case you don’t speak French, that translates to: “He sodomizes the old man before euthanizing him before the eyes of his baby”. That happens on-camera, by the way. There’s some pronoun ambiguity there, so I suppose I should specify that he brings his own baby to the old man’s house before sodomizing and euthanizing the old man—it’s not the old man’s baby. And, I mean, Percy Fawcett took his son to the jungle where they both got killed, so I guess you could argue that the sodomizer/euthanizer is a better parent if nothing else.
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