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On Lisa's suggestion I'm putting all the movie posts into their own entries. That way I can assign them all a separate category which will make it easier to sort them out at the end of the year.

Jan 16 movie: The War Game. Presented by AV Geeks, this 1966 BBC documentary about the aftermath of nuclear attack was the most grim movie I have ever seen. Seriously, I've seen some doozies, and I've been sitting here trying, and failing, to think of one that was more disturbing than The War Game. Basically they took the worst recorded events at Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and other bombed cities, and re-enacted them in gruesome detail in Kent. Burned up children screaming, the worst of the wounded being abandoned or shot, and so forth. Not exactly a laugh riot. The film was banned in Britain, I guess they feared it would cause a panic, but was available in the US and won an Academy Award.

As Skip (our host) pointed out, most Americans have never seen a mid-60s BBC documentary, but we have seen parodies of them. So The War Game resembled nothing so much as an elaborate Monty Python sketch. One with no jokes, but a lot of burned up screaming children. The Monty Python connection provided an element of surrealism that only made it more disturbing. However, I'm really glad Skip mentioned it. Because otherwise I would have thought there was something deeply wrong with me for finding the structure of the film somehow funny.

On the bright side, now I finally feel ready to rent Grave of Fireflies and Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Both of which I've wanted to see for a long time, but wasn't sure if I could handle. But they can't be worse than The War Game.

The AV Geeks presentation also included a couple of shorts: an RKO film called You Can Beat the A Bomb! which, as you can imagine, portrayed a nuclear attack as a minor inconvenience to the daily lives of middle America. After The War Game this was pretty damned funny. Also a Canadian animated short, I think the title was The Great Snit but I'm not 100% sure, about an old couple who argue over a Scrabble game, unaware that nuclear war has broken out. Just as they make up they are killed, turn into angels and go back to their game. Sounds creepy but it was actually funny and sweet.

Also yesterday I thought I had Tivo'ed a mid-sixties Michael Caine crime movie set in London. Which sounded like great fun. But I must have selected the wrong thing because I ended up with After the Fox, a monumentally unfunny mid-sixties Peter Sellers crime movie set in Italy. I'm not counting it as a movie of the day because I gave up before the halfway point.