World AIDS Day: conquering fear.

“J’ai mal, mais la douleur me rassure. Son souvenir me donne du plaisir.”

An uptight, white accountant in odds with himself, sees a Black masseur at a Turkish bathhouse. Antoine experiences a relieve – an atonement – through the pain, and forms a bond with the man. After an injury, Antoine must learn to come to terms with his fears. Based one Tennessee Williams' Desire and the Black Masseur (One Arm and Other Stories, 1948).

(A favourite) zombie movie*

 

Now, settima. Of all the zombie movies in the world you had to pick a vampire story? Why yes. Yes I did.

“Again he shook his head. The world's gone mad, he thought. The dead walk about and I think nothing of it. The return of corpses has become trivial in import. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough!”

– Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954)

Just like my actual favourite zombie film, that one from 1968, Soy leyenda is based on Richard Matheson's post-apocalyptic horror novel I Am Legend (1954). The story describes a world where the living have become undead vampire-like creatures. A lone man tries to rationalise that new world through reason and science, and legend.

 

In the man's mind, the undead become the familiar, the vampire. In our mind, watching this, we believe to see the foreshadowing of the popculture zombie. The abandoned well-known landscapes, the ceaseless repetition of what the old life had instilled, the normalcy of the grotesque. Oh how familiar they have become.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.

Billiards, or Paul Newman (1925 – 2006).

“There's too much on my mind There's too much on my mind And I can't sleep at night thinking about it I'm thinking all the time There's too much on my mind It seems there's more to life than just to live it”

– The Kinks, Too Much On My Mind (from Face To Face, 1966)

Hanns (Hanns Zischler) plays billiards with Wim Wenders.

“Of course, it's the 15th of May.”

A film about technology on what would've been Steve Jobs' 70^th birthday

“The most precious thing that we all have with us, is time.”

– Steve Jobs

A nuclear family goes about their machine-driven day while slowly forgetting to communicate.

“Today over lunch I tried to improve morale and build a sense of camaraderie among the men by holding a humorous, round-robin discussion of the early days of the mission. My overtures were brutally rejected. These men do not want a happy ship. They are deeply sick and try to compensate by making me feel miserable.”

– Sgt. Pinback's video diary

On the other end of outer space, far far away from existentialist odysseys and crypto-fascist space operas, there's a little stoner cosmos where a small, dilapidated starship manned by long-haired freaks drifts about.

“You know, I wish I had my board with me… even if I could just wax it once in a while.”

– Lt. Doolittle

Dark Star started out as a highly ambitious, underfunded student film that, in a blessed pre-Lucas, pre-blockbuster universe, got recognised for its #counterculture glory. In the early 70s, when #surfing was not yet mainstream and a handful of restless pioneers continued west despite the lack of mainland, a cross-pollination between beach blond daredevils and stoner culture happened.

 

Carpenter's laidback space odyssey fully embraces the beach bum spirit; it's meandering, incoherent, and whatever the superlative of no-budget may be. With at its core: #boredom, the most honest form of cinema.