Gangstalean

Colors

Another one of those random DVD finds in Beijing -- Colors (1988) helped spawn a series of street gang flicks and made the Bloods and Crips household names.

Despite a somewhat wack film scrore by Herbie Hancock (he was apparently still mired in his post-Rockit 80s synthesizer phase), Ice-T's title track is still bangin' after all these years (the CD soundtrack has songs by Kool G Rap, Big Daddy Kane, Roxanne Shante and Rick James).

The scene with all the gangbangers throwing signs at each other in lockdown with theme song playing is classic ... Colors, Colors, Colors, Colors, Colors...

Mamma Mia! The Films of Pier Paolo Pasolini

So I was poking around the stacks of one of Beijing's million DVD stores one day and I happened across a DVD in a white case with minimal text written on it. The name on the box said 'Salo,' and above it were the words 'Pier Paolo Pasolini' -- a name that meant nothing to me at the time.

I took the DVD home, shoved it in my stack of 'to-be-watched' DVDs and promptly forgot about it.

A few months later, on a particularly boring Sunday afternoon, I blindly grabbed the DVD out of the stack and stuck it in.

I had no idea of the utter and thorough two hour skull-fuck I was about to be subjected to.

Subversive homosexual left-wing poet-cum-painter-cum-essayist-cum-director-cum-all-around weirdo Pier Paolo Pasolini is quite unique among 20th century European directors. He was equal parts realist and fantastic -- his films lavished in symbolism, but he had a documentarians eye for presenting characters and situations in their most natural of states.

I'm no film theorist, nor do I know much about modern Italian history -- but after watching a gang of kidnapped adolescents being forcefed spoonfuls of shit by a junta of shriveled old aristocrats (Pasolini was apparently making a comment on fascism and post-war Europe) -- let's just say that Salo left an indelible - ahem - stain on my imagination.

Since then I've watched other Pasolini films -- The Decameron, Canterbury Tales, 1001 Nights, Mamma Roma, Medea -- but I still have dreams about Salo.