I wrote all of this on July 17th and never posted it. I guess I thought I was going to come back and write more, which is something I did not do.
So here it is as written. I've got one more mostly written post that actually does need finishing. I'm going to tidy that one up, then I'm going to write up a response to Brandon's 2024 post.
Kaijune and Kaijuly aren't really a thing that I'm doing, but I did end June with a re-watch of The Valley of Gwangi (1969) and start July with Gappa: The Triphibian Monster (1967). Two years apart, from two different parts of the world, they're both about leaving giant monsters alone and learning to love other people and other creatures instead of using and exploiting them for profit.
Cat Balou (1965) is fun. The comedy is a little too broad and silly for me, but I did chuckle every time drunken Kid Sheleen was "riding" his horse. The best part of the movie was certainly the ongoing sung commentary and framing of the story by Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye.
I finally caught up with Vulcanizadora (2024) and I still consider Potrykus to be one of our country's greatest living film directors. I'm sure that there are many others out there that I don't know about, but that's what it is, I just don't know about anyone else making this level of personal film at this high level of craft, either inside or outside of the studio system, in the United States. To say that this film is Faces of Death meets Crime and Punishment is only to say that Joel Potrykus has been shaped by certain nihilistic punk/metal aesthetics while continuing to care deeply about the suffering of the human soul, its dis-integration in the fragments of modern culture and (lack of) communities.
Vulcanizadora is as Kierkegaardian in its own way as Malick's Knight of Cups (which I really need to re-watch) though I don't actually think that Potrykus is influenced by Kierkegaard so much as he is tuned into realities best described by Kierkegaard.
Wikipedia is a mess, but sometimes entries are quite good, as is this one on Kiergegaard's The Sickness Unto Death.
Kierkegaard defines the self as the "relation's relating itself to itself in the relation", and defines the human experience as the tension between "the finite and the infinite" and between "the possible and the necessary". He writes that this tension is identifiable with the dialectical balancing act—the relationship—between these opposing features. Although humans are inherently reflective and self-conscious, to become a true "self" one must be conscious that the source and ground of this "self" is love, "the power that created it". When one either fails to understand the true nature of the self, or the true nature of the power that creates and sustains it, he says, one is in despair.
Marty's sustained lament in Vulcanizadora is his understanding that he is guilty and that no one is doing anything about it.
In Kurosawa's Cure (1997), Detective Takabe does not struggle with guilt (though there is this) so much as struggles to understand and explain the conscious decision to do evil. If there is no conscious decision, is there evil present? Can evil ever "make sense"?
By the end of the movie, though, it seems like maybe, just maybe, Takabe has embraced "the devil made me do it" as the excuse for his own conscious decision to do evil. Maybe.
What about when evil is banal and complicity is convenient? That's what The Apartment asks. It's still not a film I love, but I respect it more each time I see it. It's a simple Hero's Journey from Schmuck to Mensch. For most of the film, our protagonist is pathetic and participates passively in a depraved culture of deceit established by a good ol' boy's network of acceptable adultery. It's hard to care about his condition because he has walked into all of it willingly.
Too often, I hear people talk about how they had to do something, how they need to do something, how they are trapped into doing something. I understand the feeling, but the solution is always to step back and recognize that no one is forcing you to do anything. Simply do the Bartleby. "I would prefer not to." And accept the consequences.
To the extent that I do appreciate The Apartment, it is precisely because this re-establishment of agency and accepting of responsibility is at its heart.
Surprisingly, Vulcanizadora --> Cure --> The Apartment makes for a great triple feature.