cinema history class: macabre (1980)

The session: Bring Your Own Movie Month
The annual session whe5re everyone in the class takes a turn presenting a favored movie

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 5 (Joe's choice): Macabre (1980)
Directed by Lamberto Bava

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Completely unfamiliar.

Plot Synopsis:
A married woman’s lover is decapitated in a car accident after her young son dies under suspicious circumstances. After a year in a psychiatric hospital, she returns to their old love nest, where it becomes clear that she has preserved her lover’s severed head and resumed their grotesque relationship.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
Yes, I fully expected the severed head in the freezer.

That was probably the movie’s biggest drawback for me. The eventual reveal is clearly supposed to be a major shock, but I had been expecting it for a while. So when it finally came, my reaction was less “OH MY GOD!” and more “Well, there it is.”

Fortunately, the movie had plenty of other places to go. And boy, did it go there.

This was an amazing psycho-thriller that just kept getting weirder and weirder as it went along. Necrophilia? Check. Cannibalism? Check. Both were suitably gross. Yuck! But strangely enough, the grotesque visuals weren’t what I enjoyed most.

My favorite part was Lucy finally screeching at her mother about how she had drowned her little brother. It’s a deeply disturbing scene, obviously, but I got a kick out of the sheer deranged intensity of it. For me, that confrontation was the highlight of the movie and helped make for a great climax.

Then there was Robert Duvall.

No, not that Robert Duvall. For reasons known only to the filmmakers, there is actually a character named Robert Duvall. He’s blind, but also remarkably resourceful—sort of a blind MacGyver—and watching him figure things out and improvise his way through increasingly bizarre circumstances was one of the more interesting aspects of the movie.

There were also some amusing Mommie Dearest echoes in the mother-daughter relationship. Of course, Macabre actually came out a year before Mommie Dearest, so technically Joan Crawford should probably be accused of ripping off Jane Baker.

The New Orleans setting seemed like an odd choice for an Italian psycho-horror movie. On the other hand, the city’s above-ground burial practices actually make the setting relevant to the story, so it wasn’t just exotic window dressing.

I’m less certain what I thought about the supernatural ending. On its own, it’s a classic horror-movie ending and a pretty effective final jolt. But the rest of the movie hadn’t really established itself as supernatural, so it felt a little as though the movie suddenly changed the rules at the finish line. Joe pointed out that supernatural possibilities had been hinted at throughout, albeit ambiguously, so maybe the ending was more earned than I initially gave it credit for.

There were even some moments along the way that made me wonder whether the filmmakers were deliberately setting up those possibilities—or just messing with us.

Either way, by the time it was over, I had seen a movie involving a drowned child, a decapitated lover, a head in a freezer, necrophilia, cannibalism, a blind MacGyver named Robert Duvall, and a supernatural punchline.

What more could you reasonably ask from Bring Your Own Movie month?

Since this was Joe’s choice, he didn’t get to rate it.

But we know it’s a ten in his book.

mystery solved: no more cake edition

 

Sometime around 1974, I spent a summer at Camp Massad Gimmel, an Orthodox Jewish Hebrew-immersion camp. I don't remember for certain which summer it was, but it was after the Yom Kippur War, which happened in the fall of 1973, and that summer we sang a lot of songs that had come out of the war.

One of them was "Ein Lecha Ma Lid'og" (אין לך מה לדאוג) — "You Have Nothing to Worry About."

At the end of the summer, there was some sort of event at which every group performed a musical number. My group did "Ein Lecha Ma Lid'og."

Our counselor decided to lean heavily into one particular lyric in the chorus, in which the soldier asks the woman back home to send him underwear and undershirts. Without telling us, he took one undershirt and one pair of underpants from each kid in the group and dyed them purple. For our performance, we wore our newly purple underwear and undershirts over our white Shabbos clothes.

I no longer remember whether we actually sang the song or merely danced in a line while the recording played.

I do remember the purple underwear.

And, for more than half a century, I have remembered something else about that chorus that made absolutely no sense to me.

Here is the chorus:

שלחי לי תחתונים וגופיות

כאן כולם כבר כמו חיות

נלחמים כמו אריות

מורל ממש גבוה

ואצלנו בפלוגה

מבקשים קצת הפוגה

מותק לא לשלוח לי עוגה.

Roughly translated:

Send me underwear and undershirts,
Here everyone is already like animals,
Fighting like lions.
Morale is really high,
And here in our company
We're asking for a little break.
Honey, don't send me cake.

And for fifty-some years, every time I heard or thought about that song, I had essentially the same reaction:

Why the hell wouldn't he want cake?

Underwear, yes. Undershirts, yes. But surely underwear, undershirts and cake would be better.

I finally asked ChatGPT about it.

It turns out that the line isn't some Hebrew idiom I was missing. It means exactly what I thought it meant.

Don't send me cake.

And there was a very good reason.

"Ein Lecha Ma Lid'og" was written by Telma Eligon-Rose during the Yom Kippur War and was inspired in part by a postcard from her brother Giora, who was serving as a reservist near the Suez Canal.

During the war, Israelis on the home front were sending packages to the soldiers. And apparently they sent them an absolutely stupendous quantity of cakes and sweets.

So much cake.

The soldiers weren't sitting in the desert thinking, "Gee, I wish somebody would send us a nice chocolate babka."

They were apparently thinking, "For God's sake, we have enough cake."

What they needed were mundane things that weren't nearly as much fun for people back home to put into care packages.

Like underwear.

And undershirts.

And, as it turns out, toilet paper.

According to the story behind the song, Eligon-Rose's brother's actual list of needed supplies included toilet paper, underwear and undershirts. An early version of the song even mentioned the toilet paper. That proved a little too earthy for Israeli sensibilities at the time, and the lyric was changed.

Which makes the whole chorus considerably funnier once you understand it.

The message isn't really:

"I'm at war, but strangely I don't like cake."

It's more like:

"We're fine. Don't worry about us. We're fighting like lions. Morale is good. Now, please send underwear and undershirts. We could use toilet paper, too, although apparently we're not allowed to sing about that on the radio. And seriously — we appreciate the thought, but STOP SENDING CAKE."

After ChatGPT explained all this to me, I happened to be sitting with Blair, Sharon and British Rich. I read the explanation aloud to them, and we were literally laughing out loud. Well I was anyway.

Because suddenly a lyric that had puzzled me since approximately 1974 made perfect sense.

And it made me think back to Camp Massad Gimmel, where a counselor had already recognized the comic potential of this song and stolen our underwear to dye it purple.

Apparently, though, he missed an opportunity.

He should have taken away our cake, too.

cinema history classs: frankenstein meets the wolf man (1943)

The session: Bring Your Own Movie Month
The annual session whe5re everyone in the class takes a turn presenting a favored movie

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 4 (Dave's choice): Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)
Directed by Roy William Neill

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Completely unfamiliar.

Plot Synopsis:
A bunch of stuff happens -- Presumably a lot of it has to do with Frankenstein's monster and/or the wolf man. But I haven't seen this movie, so I can't say for sure.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
I missed this one, as I was upstate for a daylily convention. So I really don't have anything useful to say about this. But I'm posting this for the sake of completeness. I assume that Joe would have given it a 10 if he had been there.

breaking bad: jesse and mike couldn't be jesse and mike

I've been thinking about Breaking Bad again lately, and specifically about the things in the show that don't make sense.

There are plenty of them. And, for the most part, I don't care.

The blue meth, for example. There's no particular reason extraordinarily pure methamphetamine should suddenly turn blue. I'm sure a chemist could make a very long list of other things Breaking Bad gets wrong. That's fine. I'm not watching it as a chemistry documentary.

I also never particularly liked Gus Fring's death. The image of Gus walking out of Hector Salamanca's room, straightening his tie, and then turning to reveal that half his face has been blown off always struck me as a little too cartoonish for a show that usually took itself seriously. But it's a few seconds. Someone thought it would look cool. Whatever.

And then there's Wayfarer 515.

I've never really bought the idea that one grieving air traffic controller could return to work, make a mistake, and cause two commercial airliners to collide over Albuquerque. Is the air traffic control system really so fragile that everything comes down to one guy having a bad day? There aren't redundant systems? Other controllers? Computers? Pilots looking at radar? Some enormous red light somewhere saying DON'T LET THE TWO AIRPLANES HIT EACH OTHER?

But again: whatever.

None of these things fundamentally changes the show.

There are two things that do bother me, though, because they're not really plot contrivances. They're characters. And they're two of the best characters in the Breaking Bad universe.

Mike Ehrmantraut doesn't make sense.

This actually bothers me more after Better Call Saul, because Better Call Saul tells us where Mike came from. He wasn't some former Green Beret, CIA operative or international assassin. He was a Philadelphia beat cop. A corrupt one, at least to a degree, and an alcoholic. He was a man beaten down by life and consumed by guilt over the death of his son.

Then he gets to Albuquerque and somehow becomes Batman.

Mike knows everything.

He understands surveillance, counter-surveillance, weapons, tracking, criminal organizations, security systems and police procedure. He can follow people without being seen and detect when he's being followed. He can infiltrate buildings, plan elaborate operations, outthink professional criminals and calmly improvise when everything goes wrong. He seems to know exactly how drug cartels work. He can be a sniper, a private investigator, a bodyguard, a fixer, a security consultant, an interrogator and a one-man tactical team.

Where did he learn all this?

Some of it makes sense. He was a cop, so of course he knows police procedure. He may have picked up some useful skills along the way. And Mike is obviously intelligent.

But the Mike we eventually get isn't merely an intelligent former cop with street smarts. He's an extraordinarily accomplished specialist in approximately everything.

I love the character. Jonathan Banks is magnificent. But I don't buy the résumé.

And then there's Jesse Pinkman.

Jesse's transformation may be even harder to believe.

When we meet Jesse, he's a screwup. He's an addict. He barely made it through high school. Walt remembers him as a lousy chemistry student. Jesse is already cooking meth, but apparently not particularly good meth. His big contribution to chemistry is adding chili powder.

Then he spends some time working with Walter White.

And somehow, by the end, Jesse has become one of the greatest meth cooks in the world.

This is especially important because the show repeatedly establishes that Walt's product isn't just good. It's extraordinary. His purity is so far beyond what everyone else is producing that it becomes his calling card. Gale Boetticher is an actual trained chemist with an advanced education, and even he is in awe of Walt's work.

Yet Jesse eventually becomes capable of reproducing it well enough that Gus is willing to send him to Mexico to teach cartel chemists how to do it.

That's quite a career trajectory for the guy who couldn't pass Mr. White's chemistry class.

And it's not only chemistry. Jesse becomes substantially smarter as the series goes along. Not more mature—smarter. He starts seeing things other people don't see. He comes up with plans. He understands people. At several points he figures things out before characters who are supposedly much more sophisticated than he is.

Again, I love Jesse. Aaron Paul took what could easily have been a one-note character and made him one of the emotional centers of the series.

I just don't entirely believe the person Jesse becomes was hiding inside the person we met.

Interestingly, I don't have the same problem with Walter White.

Walt makes sense.

From the beginning, we're told that Walt is brilliant. Not just smart. Brilliant. He helped found Gray Matter Technologies, and the company went on to become enormously valuable after he left. Whatever exactly happened between Walt, Gretchen and Elliott, it's obvious that Walt has spent years watching other people enjoy the success and fortune he believes should have been his.

So when the mild-mannered high-school teacher turns out to have an enormous reservoir of pride, resentment and rage buried underneath, I buy it.

Heisenberg didn't suddenly appear when Walt got cancer.

Heisenberg was already there.

Cancer just gave him permission to come out.

That's why Walt's transformation, outrageous as it becomes, works for me in a way that Mike's and Jesse's don't. The seeds are there from the beginning. Walt always had the intelligence. He always had the ego. He always had the resentment. The series is largely about watching circumstances strip away everything that had kept those qualities under control.

With Mike and Jesse, I sometimes feel as though the writers fell in love with the characters—and with Jonathan Banks and Aaron Paul—and kept making them more capable because they were so much fun to watch.

Mike became cooler, so he had to become more formidable.

Jesse became more important, so he had to become more competent.

Eventually Mike became the guy who could do anything, and Jesse became the guy who could cook Walter White's meth.

Neither ruins Breaking Bad for me. Not remotely. It's still one of the greatest television shows I've ever watched.

I can accept blue meth. I can accept Gus Fring adjusting his tie with half a face. Maybe. I can even accept that Jane's grieving father can accidentally knock two airplanes out of the sky.

Those are things the plot asks me to believe for a few minutes.

Mike and Jesse are different.

The show asks me to believe them for years.

And I'm still not sure I do.

Did you like this feature?

Strengthen my Jesse argument against obvious objections

Sharpen my plot-versus-character thesis earlier

Trim my opening examples before Mike

cinema history class: weapons (2025)

The session: Bring Your Own Movie Month
The annual session whe5re everyone in the class takes a turn presenting a favored movie

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 3 (Ethan's  choice): Weapons (2025)
Directed by Zach Cregger

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I had seen it once before -- at home, with Ethan when he was trying to decide whether to bring it or something else.

Plot Synopsis:
When 17 children from the same elementary-school class mysteriously vanish from their homes at exactly 2:17 a.m., their teacher and the father of one of the missing children separately try to uncover what happened, gradually discovering a disturbing supernatural explanation.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
This was Ethan’s pick, and he made the somewhat risky choice of going with a recent release. There’s always a danger in doing that: with an older movie, you at least have some sense of whether it has stood the test of time. With something brand new, you’re going in with some doubt -- am I blinded by the newness of it?

In this case, the gamble paid off with some really enthusiastic praise for the movie and for Ethan's choice to bring it.

Weapons begins as a mystery. Seventeen children from the same class get out of bed at exactly 2:17 in the morning, leave their homes, and disappear. From there, the movie initially seems to be asking a fairly straightforward question: what happened to them?

But somewhere along the way, almost without announcing that it is doing so, the movie transforms. What begins as a mystery gradually turns into something much closer to a zombie movie. I liked that progression. The movie doesn’t suddenly throw out everything it has been doing and become something else; it feels as though the horror was lurking underneath the mystery all along and was simply waiting to emerge.

One thing I was less enthusiastic about was the way the story was told. We follow the events from one character’s perspective, then the movie jumps backward and begins again from another character’s point of view. Then it does it again. And again. Until I caught on to what the movie was doing, I found it confusing. Apparently I was in the minority on this one, because several of the others in the room really liked that structure. Once I understood the device, I appreciated it more, but I’m still not sure I would have chosen to tell the story that way.

Fortunately, even with all of that doubling back, the movie never dragged. That’s actually rather impressive. Replaying overlapping portions of a story from different viewpoints could easily become tedious, but Weapons keeps moving.

And once everything starts coming apart, the camera work does a terrific job conveying the chaos. The later sequences feel frantic without becoming visually incomprehensible. You know enough about what is happening to follow it, while still feeling the panic and disorder of the characters themselves.

There was also something about the movie that reminded me of Village of the Damned. The circumstances are obviously very different, but there is a similar unsettling quality to taking something as ordinarily harmless as a group of children and turning it into the center of something deeply wrong.

Most of all, I admired the decision not to force a happy ending onto the story. It was a bold move to end on such a depressing note, but by that point it was also the ending the movie had earned. A conventional everybody-is-okay-now conclusion would have felt false after everything that had happened, and how the explanation was unfolding. The ending is bleak, but it makes sense, and I think the movie is better because the filmmakers were willing to follow their story where it logically led.

Joe certainly thought so.

He gave Weapons a 10—but this time he made a point of distinguishing it from many of his other 10s. Some of those, he explained, are essentially genre-specific 10s: a 10 because the movie accomplishes exactly what that particular kind of movie is trying to accomplish. This one, according to Joe, was a genuine, real-world 10.

He has explained the distinction many times before, “some tens are tennier than others.”

Apparently this was one of the tennier tens.