Do not forsake me

My Friend Dahmer

Crit

This portrait of the cannibalistic serial killer as a young boy is based on the memoir of a high school classmate, but it seems more like a literal-minded guess by an outsider of what must have made Dahmer Dahmer: the worst parents and the worst teachers ever, plus repression of his sexuality, plus a cadre of friends-in-the-sense-that-only-self-involved-adolescents-can-conceive-of-friendship, who, by exploiting the entertainment value of Jeff's inherent weirdness, may or may not have exacerbated it.

Not a bad film, but a surprisingly bland one.

1945

Crit

Small town, wedding day, and angst aroused by the arrival of a train--anybody else put in the mind of High Noon? It doesn't stop there, either, as the townspeople, some morally bankrupt, some just morally weak, try to repel or finesse the potential loss of the source of the town's economic comfort.

I don't want to go into too much detail because this is actually a bit of a mystery, but I will say that it's the first Holocaust (technically post-Holocaust) film I've seen in ages that has discomfited me in a completely new way. This is a film I'll be considering when I assemble my top ten list in 22 days (actually 19 days; this is a postdated post).