– Men are extinct.

– They were not mammoths!

Provocateur Boyd Rice and friends perform a Satanic rite on August 8, 1988; exactly 20 years minus one year minus one day after the Tate-LaBianca murders.

“The entire world is rotten and corrupt… to us they're dead people who refuse to lay down, they're cadavers”

– Boyd Rice speaking to Geraldo Rivera (via)

Please note that the linked article is written by an dimwitted ignoramus completely oblivious of Boyd Rice's, and Anton LaVey's, prankster background.

Everything's expensive: someone is a at bank or ATM*

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for July is, for unknown reasons, mostly not date-related and follows some sort of vacation narrative.

Traveling to my vacation destination, a map or globe*

“It appears obvious that the territory is the sum of all the maps, the result of an infinite addition. Or a contrary, the territory is what is left when we remove all the sets of lines, drawings, traces and colors which are covering it. Its existence becomes doubtful.”

– H., via

A man, H., joins two others playing jeu de l'oie (Game of the Goose), a board game associated with labyrinths and pilgrimage. While the three play, the game opens up maps and new roads to explore.

 

Following my own Bales' rules, I cannot pick a title twice. See Zig-Zag as an avatar of Raúl Ruiz's O Território [The Territory] from 1981.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for July is, for unknown reasons, mostly not date-related and follows some sort of vacation narrative.

A movie that takes place in nature for National Trails Day (USA)

 

Mavka, a forest nymph, falls in love with mortal Lukash, who in his turn is punished by the Spirit of the Forest for marrying another mortal instead. Curse upon curse, Lukash is turned into a wolf, and Mavka into a weeping willow.

 

The colours, mood and impact of the four seasons on mortal and sprite alike is there, not only made visible by Ilyenko's ethereal, spiralling camera, but somewhere blooming deep inside us, observing.

An actor, director or character from Utah – National Utah Day (USA)

 

Billy the Kid steps out of a huge poster of Monument Valley right into a Tokyo bar and becomes its bar keeper. Together with a samurai, a WW2 G.I, Marx-Engels (not a typo), the Japanese weather service number 177 and others, he keeps the tavern safe from various thugs roaming the streets.

A killer title track for National Title Track Day (USA)

“The fear in her eyes and the knife in the chest. That's my last memory of my mother. That's why I had to go to prison for four years, even though she survived.”

– opening lines

What stabs you harder in the chest than Klaus Schulze's synth-driven killing spree?

A receptionist or secretary for Receptionist Day

 

The proprietor and receptionist of a small hotel welcomes a new guest. The woman, her name she doesn't tell, stays for only one night with the promise to return the following week. The receptionist waits.

Testosterone! for Top Gun Day (USA)

 

The Ζεϊμπέκικο (Zeibekiko) is a Greek dance, improvised by one man, alone. It's a dance that shows the performer's manliness, both his pride and his sorrows. Out of respect for the dancer, the others sit down, watch, and relate to him.

 

When the police enters the establishment – and this is 1973, the colonels ruled the naton – and interrupt the dancer, his older brother steps in.

An actor, director or character named Anthony for National Anthony Day (USA).

“Everything comes from the Great Book of Nature. Human attainments are an already printed book.”

– Antoni Gaudí