Capsules is a monthly diary of older movies either seen for the time or revisited after many years.

Husbands (John Cassavetes, 1970)

Husbands announces itself as “A Comedy About Life, Death and Freedom”, and “Comedy” may actually be the most ambitious word in there, as it’s a term that Cassavetes could only ever use loosely. This one’s more an absurdist drama, where the unruly excess of his characters—either the stuff of life or the stuff of acting workshops—is necessary for the moments where pure, crystalline, vulnerable emotional truth rises up out of it. A potent look at men who emasculate themselves just by clinging desperately to manliness. It sets out to feel like the days and nights you’re ashamed of. It succeeds.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

Boxcar Bertha (Martin Scorsese, 1972)

This Corman-produced hothouse gangster flick is considered Scorsese’s nadir, and rightly so. (According to history/lore, Cassavetes turned to Scorsese and politely told him he’d spent a year of his life making “a piece of shit”, prompting young Marty to regroup). The script is thin and porous, and there are only trace amounts of Scorsese’s flair with editing and camerawork—at least before the germ gets loose in the red-bloody-Catholic finale. Until then, it’s drifting actors, indifferent grindhouse luridness, wonky plotting, and home movie staging. But its mediocrity should be inspiring, both for directors and those who follow them. After all, the next stop was Mean Streets.

✬✬✩✩✩

*****

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki, 1984)

Miyazaki’s manga-turned-movie is by any standard—in suspense, intrigue, world-building, visual design—a top-notch action sci-fi movie in a decade full of them. If you come at it from a reverse Totoro, you may miss the Wonderland/Narnia effect he can get by leaving one foot in reality. But the construction of Nausicaä makes a strong case for Miyazaki as one of better epic filmmakers of his era: lean, grand, purposeful, imaginative, with his eco-pacifist morality feeling somehow both idealistic and worldly.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

Made in U.S.A. (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)

Godard’s kiss-off to making “fun” movies is, ironically, one of his most inviting, maybe because it goes full looney, or because it makes no less sense than a normal noir, or because Godard’s typically dense set of allusions is so very American. This is Godard trying to reconcile our country’s best absurdities (his favorite B-movies) with our worst, creating an immediate, accessible, and pleasurable pinpoint of the exact moment he fully swapped genre for radical politics. And Anna Karina, watching as tears go by, makes a wonderfully animated plucky detective.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)

Third time’s the charm, I guess. After being unmoved twice in film school—first finding it an impenetrable object, second a po-mo intellectual stunt—catching Contempt in a theater ten years later finally did it. How close can a cinephile get to their dream world without killing their muse? Suppose they took the muse for granted? Suppose the muse didn’t want to be a muse, but had her own desires in life? There are multitudes here, possibly the best film about selling out, drawn from big themes and little games so private that it helps to have basked in Godard (and his own cinephile heroes) to feel it. And “feel” is the operative word.

✬✬✬✬✬

*****

Baraka (Ron Fricke, 1992)

I’ve heard some viewers watch this ambitious, eye-popping documentary and feel at one with the universe. I can report no such awakening, except to emerge with renewed appreciation for grand cinematic undertakings and the power of the image. A lot of its cosmic metaphors are elementary, though that doesn’t make them untrue. My main hang-up is that I’m not sure how I feel about turning real individuals into symbolic props. But between the scale and the CinemaScope frame, this is its own kind of epic cinema, where the sets and synchronized crowds are provided by the world itself. For movie buffs, an astounding trip and a lucid tone poem—even for those who find that term uninviting.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****