92 posts categorized "BDSM"

July 05, 2025

THE PIANO TECHER — THE CRITERION COLLECTION

 Jo JoWelcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

Punk heart still beating.

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Thanks a lot acorns!

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ColeSmithey.com

 

 

ColeSmithey.comMichael Haneke skillfully adapts fellow Austrian, and Nobel Prize winner, Elfriede Jelinek's 1983 autobiographical novel into a deeply insightful film about the lasting results of physical and emotional trauma as explored through Isabelle Huppert's Erika Kohut character.

Erika only ever has trouble in mind. Familial exploitation has been a constant presence in her life. Her father died in a mental institution.

Elfriede Jelinek's transgressive narrative is set in Austria where an ongoing abusive relationship between Erika and her live-in mother (Annie Girardot) plays out in brutal fashion.

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Mother and daughter sleep in the same adjacent beds where the now absent father once slept, even though Erika has a room of her own.

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The mother destroys colorful clothing that Erika purchases but rarely if ever wears. The women engage in knock-down-drag-out fights that end in hugs and apologies.

Nothing functional, normal, or peaceful can exist in their fraught relationship.

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Her mother says, "That's just how we are. We're a hot-blooded family."

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Erika teaches classical piano in private lessons at the Viennese conservatory where she lords her thorough classical musical knowledge over her young students with cold hostility. Erika sternly follows her mother's command that she never allow any of her students to surpass her talent.

Equal parts sadist and masochist, Erika is a perv on the prowl. Her mastery of classical piano goes hand in hand with her extreme desire for sexual perversity.

One very telling scene, in which Erika instructs Walter at the piano, involves her pointing out all of the different musical notations that give breath, nuance, and complexity to the Classical piece at hand. With verbal cues Erika precisely guides Walter's fingertips via his intellect to exert the exact amount of pressure that she so deeply desires.

This is magnificent filmmaking on full display.

ColeSmithey.com

Erika goes to peep shows where she smells, if not licks, cum-soaked tissues left behind by past male visitors. Erika frequents drive-in movies where she stalks young lovers having sex in cars that she squats beside to urinate while masturbating. Self-annihilation is her ultimate goal. Humiliation is a ritual.

Romantic love as a social construct doesn't exist, pain and humiliation must attend any sensual encounter.

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Erika is also a cutter.

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Enter Walter (Benoît Magimel), a clean-cut college engineering student with an innate talent for classical piano. Walter is drawn to Erika like a moth to flame. Little does Walter realize that he has set foot in a spider's web.

ColeSmithey.com

Handsome, polite, intelligent, and articulate, Walter boxes outside his weight class with Erika by a good 20 years. Walter's simplistic idea of love is leagues away from Erika's desired sexual set pieces.

This is the romance Erika has been waiting for. However much Erika is able to handle Walter's immediate sexual needs, he cannot return the favor when it comes to Erika's perverse proclivities, however dirty, desperate, or exhibitionist they may be in practice.

ColeSmithey.com

"The Piano Teacher" is a stunning work of transgressive filmic art for its rigorous attention to the complex psychologies of its characters. Ego and id, desire and need, rules and anarchy, stupidity and intelligence, creation and destruction, all explode at once in a flash of willfully exposed degradation.

ColeSmithey.com

Isabelle Huppert and Benoît Magimel deliver performances of a lifetime.

I know of no other movie that begins to capture the depth of emotional truths that Hanake's adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek's novel, affords the viewer.

Michael Hanake is the anti-Quentin Tarantino. Both filmmakers author their movies. "The Piano Teacher" is the only time that Haneke didn't write his own script.

ColeSmithey.com

Michael Hanake views violence in movies as pornography. Rather, Hanake utilizes obscenity as a dramatic and satirical tool equally valuable to John Cassavetes's soul-bearing approach to characters and situations.

The sex that occurs in this film exerts an undeniable erotic power. Hanake allows human eroticism to exist in scenes that play out in real time. Their semi-public places add inherent suspense. Your guts get involved.

ColeSmithey.com

A modern-day Pasolini, Michael Haneke rigorously attends to the molecules of narrative that enable vibrant drama to freely breed under his magnificent actors' attentive care.

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Although he is retired, Michael Haneke's films remain a beacon of hope in Cinema. Here is a true filmic poet with wisdom and insights that become crystal clear through his provocative and controversial films.

"The Piano Teacher" is one of Michael Haneke's greatest achievements. It is one of the few movies that dares to delve beneath the surface of BDSM psychology.

Rated R. 131 mins.

5 Stars

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

February 13, 2025

DEAD CALM

Jo JoWelcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

Punk heart still beating.

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

Cheers!

ColeSmithey.com

 

ColeSmithey.comQuentin Tarantino's opinion that the '80s was a terrible decade for films, gets a cold hard slap from Australian director Philip Noyce's intense 1989 thriller.

Between Billy Zane's best Marlon Brando impersonation as a sociopath, Nicole Kidman's break-out performance as a mother traumatized by the death of her young son, and Sam Neil as her experienced sailor husband, is a movie that stands the test of time.

ColeSmithey.com

"Dead Calm" is the only non-3D movie I know of to have a scene capable of making you duck out of the way when it hits.

Wow.

"Dead Calm's" triple climax is a satisfying doozy.

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The action takes place on the high seas where Rae (Kidman) and hubby John (Neil) are sailing on their luxurious sailboat on an extended vacation.

Trouble comes fast and furious when they rescue Hughie Warriner, the lone survivor of six-person crew aboard a still sinking ship.

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The less you know going in, the better because this movie has so many surprises to take your breath away.

Fun, scary and suspenseful from start to finish, get out the popcorn and beer for this white-knuckle thrill ride.

Bon appetite.

Rated R. 96 mins.

5 Stars

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

January 20, 2025

NOSFERATU

Jo JoWelcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

Punk heart still beating.

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

Cheers!

ColeSmithey.com

 

Robert Eggers Digs His Own Grave

By Cole Smithey

ColeSmithey.comIf you've seen Robert Eggers's excellent film "The Lighthouse," then you should have high expectations for how Eggers could approach the well-worn story of Irish novelist Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic horror novel "Dracula."

Sadly, you will be disappointed.

"The Lighthouse" is everything that "Nosferatu" is not — suspenseful, and dark in a terrifyingly human way.

There's not much humanity in this plot-crammed and poorly written "Nosferatu."

ColeSmithey.com

Eggers's inspiration arrives via Henrik Galeen's 1925 German expressionist script for F.W. Murnau's groundbreaking if politically problematic silent movie, considering its obvious racist underpinnings.

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Overworked and under-edited, Robert Eggers's "Nosferatu" is not without its charms. Lily Rose Depp is a revelation in her exotic role as Ellen Hunter, a young, horny, nubile woman who offers herself up to the universe to be devoured by whatever form (alien, human, evil or otherwise) that comes through her open window.

Careful what you wish for.

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A sleepy first act finally gives way to a late reveal of the monster. To be clear, Nosferatu is a hook-nosed freak of nature non-human creature, well except for his exposed penis.

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Yes, "Peenee on set" was announced during the filming of the scene where Bill Skarsgård's Nosferatu shows up very nude, and sporting the most ridiculous mustache you've ever seen. 

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This Nosferatu gives mustache rides. Now that's scary. Beauty and the beast indeed. Unlike Bela Lugosi's Dracula, this vampire is no charmer. Zero sex appeal on display.

"Nosferatu" is visually stunning but the screenwriting is not up to snuff by a lot.

Eggers is so obsessed with ticking off a checklist of details culled from every vampire movie ever made that he ties himself up. He employs tropes rather than imbuing the story with novel meaning. The movie goes so far as to throw in a gratuitous Exorcist scene that stumbles.

ColeSmithey.com

Werner Herzog's "Nosferatu The Vampyre" (1997) is a far superior to Eggers's film in every way. Herzog's movie is simply told in a hyper stylized yet sparse setting where fear and suspense breed.

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Hell, Paul Morressey's 1974 cult classic "Blood For Dracula" is a damn sight better than Eggers's movie.

Robert Eggers has squandered a great opportunity to use Bram Stoker's novel as a leaping off narrative form from which to improvise his own cinematic narrative design of suspenseful intent. 

Where is your sense of Jazz improvisation Mr. Eggers?

Come on man; you're better than this.

ColeSmithey.com

If it were me I'd have cast Bill Skarsgård as Ellen Hunter's put-upon husband Thomas, and given the role of Nosferatu to his brother Alexander Skarsgård, who I might add would have been much more charming and dignified — think Astro-Hungarian Empire royalty.

I'd have played up suspense in the three hellhounds sequence where Thomas gets chased off a ledge into the abyss below. This sequence should be the centerpiece of the film.

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I'd have let Thomas die from his fall, and have him communicate with Ellen telepathically (post-death) in her dreams as Ellen does with her domineering sex master Nosferatu. Nevermind that this vampire has all the appeal of a zombie meth addict with lesions all over his body that rebuke his gigantic well-groomed mustache.

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"Nosferatu" is infuriating because of its cut-and-paste approach, and due to its lack of originality.

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A miscast Willem Dafoe does the movie no favors as Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, a Van Helsing archetype. This is the worst performance I've ever seen from Willem Dafoe.

Viggo Mortensen would have been much better casting.

ColeSmithey.com

I suppose this film's tag line, "Succumb to the Darkness" is an apt sentiment in the age of global warming and yet another Trump era.

This vampire movie is perfectly watchable; you may feel inclined to nap during it. Don't worry, you won't miss much.

Rated R. 140 mins.

2 Stars

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

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