Eurotrash

This was a cinema term from my youth, when pretentious artsy films were released, but had no real art to them. A notable precursor to Eurotrash films was the crap of Jean Cocteau; but Eurotrash hit its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s.



Sorry, but Buster Keaton did it better.

Perhaps the first Eurotrasher, chronologically, was Luis Bunuel, whose pompous, bloated films were dull, although he had a modicum of filmic talent.



The same could be said by New Wave poseur Jean-Luc Godard: no depth, but a little skill, here and there.



How about Rainer Werner Fassbinder? His films were pretentious, but bad....yet, some were so bad that they engendered an Ed Woodian level humor to them.



The same could not be said for Pier Paolo Pasolini; possibly the worst film director who's taken 'seriously' as an artist by critics. Why? Because he was a Left Wing lunatic who stuffed all sorts of crap into his films with that sort of ideal.



But his films were garbage- soft core porno.

Yet, the films of Spanish B film superstar Paul Naschy (whose films I recently got and NEED to watch) were laughed at, as piffle. It's been well over 30 years since I saw a wolfman or a vampire ravage a bare Castilian breast, but, even though my memory is not perfect, Naschy's films were far superior to all the Eurotrashers I have named.



See?

Teorema

I thought Salo was bad, but Teorema, made in 1968, may be even worse- more pretentious, duller, and without a shred of humor.

It has Terence Stamp in a performance as, basically, a mannekin, and Anne Wiazemsky- the girl from Au Hasard Balthazar, as basically, a catatonic. Excited yet?

Watching this 98 minute piece of dreck made me wonder which was more unbelievable- the actual technical incompetence of Pasolini- from lighting that shows the movement of the lights to poorly framed scenes to bad acting, worse writing, a bizarre mix of sepia and color film, to characters that are silly to symbolism that is sillier to sex that is unconsummated onscreen to, well, ok, there's no shit, like in Salo.

But, maybe this shit needed more shit?

A full review will follow, but, damn, if there's a finer piece of overrated Eurotrash film out there, I don't want to see it. Pasolini was worse than Cocteau and Godard, two infamous Eurotrash poseurs who preceded him, and Fassbinder, too. He was also a terrible writer and poet; a man with no ideas and no ability to express them.

This is where a Kobo Abe or a Samuel Beckett is needed. Instead, it's just Pasolini. Zzzzzzzzzz....

I call this snippet, young queer with Pollock Syndrome:



This is idiot daughter readying self for catatonia:



Ugh! I guess we can be thankful for gay male prostitutes with psychoses, for one did PPP in not too long after Salo, and the world was saved from decades more of this shit!

Salo: The Dullest Film Ever?

Shit-eating and assorted other debaucheries made not repulsive, but dull.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was a failed poet and writer, and, like Jean Cocteau, decided to take his failure into another art form.

Salo, or 120 Days Of Sodom is a yawnfest from start to end.

Herein a trailer/clip:



Quoth me: 'Overall, Salò, or 120 Days Of Sodom is a very bad film; not the worst film I’ve ever watched, but surely amongst the dullest- think of an Andy Warhol Factory Film with some pointless perversions tossed in. There is little artistic merit, technically, no real narrative nor character development, no deeper ‘meaning,’ so why watch it? The only possible reason would be so that a young filmmaker could see exactly what NOT to do. I will watch some of Pasolini’s other films, but given my knowledge of this and his poetastry, I hold out little hope of getting by aesthetic socks knocked off.
Of course, one of the reasons the film’s ‘reputation’- such as it is, has endured, is because of the death of Pasolini shortly after the film’s premiere. Depending on your mood, it was either ironic or fitting that Pasolini was murdered by a young man who was repulsed by the lech’s overt homosexual advances and propositioning for money. There are several versions of the tale, online, but the most consistent details seem to be that the underaged youth, then recently released from jail, beat the crap out of the filmmaker, left him in the road, and then took Pasolini’s keys to his car and repeatedly ran over the man with his own Alfa Romeo until he was dead. Naturally, and given the acrimony following the release of Salo, Pasolini defenders took to claiming that the Left Wing ‘artist’- a convicted child molester, himself, could not have been killed by the kid, but was the target of- you got it, a government conspiracy to ‘silence him.’ Now, given the utter lack of intellectual depth that his last film, and his body of poetry, as well as a sampling of his ‘critical writings’ that I have read translations of, this would be akin to the proverbial ‘using a sledgehammer to kill a flea.’ But, it has kept Pasolini and this swill on the fringes of cinematic consciousness. In fact, in 2006, Time Out magazine rated Salò the most controversial film ever made, or, did exactly what PPP wanted: if one is incapable of art, go for what keeps the name.'

Correct again!