Ten Recent Reviews

I Was Born, But... -
Ozu in a comic mode often reminiscent of the Little Rascals, but serious stuff is never far away. The brilliant cross cutting scene between the kids bored in class and the grinding routine of the adult work world tells the kids exactly what is in store for them once they become an adult like their father. Which, even though they don't know it yet, is at the heart of why the kids are so disappointed in their father as he sucks up to his boss. Cinematography is stellar, absolutely gorgeous, with a common trait of Ozu's - contrasting domestic life with the industrialized wires, posts and towers that surround us. This could be from a relatively rural area of today, both in look and in theme. Absolutely brilliant. (And as a side note, the score took a little getting used to, but once I did I think it fit perfectly.)




Stuck -
Stuart Gordon has been better, but this one's still pretty good - if you share his cynicism and sense of humor about humankind, anyway. I kind of do and so I kind of liked it. I expected some garish, over-the-top stuff, but he actually reigned in the excesses that might have sent it up into Grand Guignol territory and kept focus on the story. Which is great, because the (fact-based) story is worth it; an implausible situation made believable by both script and acting. Of course, it does delve into the sort of pessimism that's a mainstay of Gordon's films from Re-Animator onward. Rea and Suvari in particular are good and (along with Gordon's understated direction) bring some weight and emotion to what in other hands might have been a trashy spectacle. Good stuff.




The Honeymoon Killers -
Grim little film touched with trashiness that's surely a huge influence on John Waters - I can't watch Shirley Stoler's performance and not think that Divine aped her move for move in the early Dreamland films. Between low budget and sound, gritty script and documentary-influenced shooting, it packs a real punch and again makes me think of Waters throughout. Starts out like it could get all campy on you and by the time the pair have become seasoned killers and knock off an old lady who's been natteringly annoying up until the moment of her doom when you really feel for her, you're inexorably drawn in to the world they've made here. A shame that director Leonard Kastle never made another film, because he's got the skills for sure.










Duel in the Sun -
Listen, I'm a sucker for a good Shakespeare adaptation, especially when the source is King Lear, so I was pretty much destined to like this from the beginning. But what's all this crap I read about it being some sort of overheated, cheap romance? Where's the real dramatic tension in the film? Sure, the plotline about Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones is central but the competition of the brothers for not just Jones, but for their father's affection and attention takes an equal part on the stage they've set, and that's Lear to the core. Peck is great as the scumbag Lewt and Jones fine as the "overheated" mixed-race Pearl, but for me the real deal lies in the familial relations and especially in Lionel Barrymore's Senator McCanles, an arrogant, racist windbag right up until the moment that everything falls apart for him and you find that you actually have some sympathy. If this didn't have the Lear connection and was only about Jennifer Jones choosing between the good and bad brothers, I'd probably agree more with the review on IMDB that calls it a "bawdy, overacted sexual western." But it does have the Lear connection. And I don't think it's "overacted" (whatever that means).





Fast Cheap and Out of Control -
Philosophy 101. Maybe Philosophy 201. Instead of wacko theories flying around like in Waking Life this tells how four people in wildly disparate professions find that their work ultimately boils down to their desire to understand the purpose of man, man's social organizations, and/or man's place in the world and relation to nature. Of course it's not laid out as schematically as all that, which is a big part of the charm of the film. Just a few guys telling their stories that somehow connect across to each other and create a slowly increasing web of ideas about the aformentioned topics. Lots of food for thought and if none of these guys call themselves philosphers within the film, they're treading the same ground as philosophers - and Morris knows it. I still don't think I've seen quite how deep this film goes on two viewings.




Ninotchka -
Writing, acting and direction all top notch - presumably the famous "Lubitsch touch" that I've read about but not really experienced enough yet to understand it. But I'm enamored enough of this sparklingly enjoyable film to want to find out fully what it means. Garbo in particular is great as deadpan Russian investigator and also great as she turns into the comic-romantic lead. This is exactly the kind of film people are talking about when the talk about the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Mother of Tears -

It's tough for me to say much about this film without starting an endless tirade of picking apart every sad detail - it's a total non-entity in my mind. Unlike Argento's best films which have the non-sensical, illogical qualities of a nightmare, this one spells out a story that makes perfect sense (within its own parameters, of course) but has no drive, no build, no set piece that holds you, no anything to recommend it. If this didn't have Argento's name plastered across the film, it would be utterly dismissed as the work of some lazy amateur who'd probably be likely to carve out a career of tired, straight-to-video sequels of moderate box-office successes like the Leprechaun franchise. While he assembles a number of ideas that could've been worked into a plausibly scary or affecting film, he just never does anything to develop them and we're left with lazy scene after scene of half-baked ideas that a couple rewrites, a little more time spent in pre-production - just anything - might have helped. It's sad that the great Suspiria, already suspect for being tied to the disastrous Inferno, will now be sullied further by yet another lame partner.

Wall-E -

A love story set in a mildly anti-corporate eco-disaster, not anything more political than that, so don't believe the hype about its message, which is really that adorable little robots can fall in love too. That said, I loved it - absolutely loved it. Imagery is gorgeous throughout - brilliant work again by the Pixar folks. And it's funny, sad, ultimately a totally poignant work of art told mostly through the visuals and not through dialogue, just like the best of Chaplin, Keaton, Tati - all of whom have been name-dropped in interviews and rightfully so. It also occupies a place in my head right near the fantastic Babe: Pig in the City, which I also absolutely loved. I've recommended it to everyone I know so far, even if they've expressed distaste for animated "children's" films and I'm dying to go see it again in the theater. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it - that's a really good sign.

Across 110th Street -

Interesting - where I expected either a gritty on-the-streets take on sticking it to the man via crime or a cop-buddy-Blaxploitation pic, I got neither and ended up with something more class-conscious than I expected. Starts out as the first thing - three guys rob some Mob cats working in tandem with Harlem gangsters, kill the roomful of thugs and hide out with 300K. A hardened white cop (Anthony Quinn) and a young, local, black cop (Yaphet Kotto) are assigned find the killers/thieves, as is a Mob underling (Antony Franciosa) and the staff of the Harlem boss (Richard Ward) on whose watch the crime took place (though obviously for different reasons). So as the gangsters work through the underworld and the streets to find who ripped them off, the cops work their way through a public that refuses to aid them, thereby checking off the on-the-streets crime pic and the hateful-slowly-turning-to-respectful partnership cop film I expected. What I didn't expect was the film's third act, when our sympathies switch to the plight of the three robbers - what got them to the desperate point of choosing to rip off gangsters and how they individually try to get away. It's strange the way the film plays with expectations and moves our sympathies around without making a big deal of it. Like many films in the style it's mostly a blunt, straightforward telling of events with no artsy pretense of something as lofty as "class-consciousness" or anything like it. Which for me makes it all the more appealing. It's not great, but it's way better than a lot of the cheap cop and spy thriller knockoffs that populate the genre.

Sorcerer -

Again we're cast adrift in a world of desperate criminals on the lam in this fine remake of Clouzout's classic Wages of Fear, but this time out we're actively aware almost from the get-go that we'll be watching their trials and tribulations and probably rooting for them. It doesn't vary much from the original story, but adds enough of its own touches to mark it out as something different (most notably the trip over the rotting bridge) and the brutal, often shocking physicality common to Friedkin's films is all over this one, beginning to end - its PG rating is surprising to me; I doubt it'd get even a PG-13 today. Scheider is great, as usual, while the other men fleshing out the doomed crew are equally strong. Some of the understated ideas of Clouzout's film are brought to the surface - there's little doubt as to whether Nilo killed someone to get the job - and the same grim pessimism about what men will do for money (especially if they're desperate) overrides this film. I liked it quite a bit -doesn't exactly replace Wages of Fear, but it's a strong addition to Friedkin's ouevre.

Ten recent reviews:

Thriller! A Cruel Picture -

I wish I knew what they were getting at here. The version I saw did not have the notorious penetration scenes, but I doubt they would've changed the idea of the film, in which a young girl is raped, falls mute, and then as a young woman is kidnapped, forcibly addicted to drugs and forced to serve as a prostitute until she gains enough experience in hand to hand combat, firearms, and driving skills to exact her revenge. I've told you everything that happens here, and I wish that as an exploitation picture it had played a little more on something - the film is as clinical as that description, giving you very little to take from it, to think about during or after it. It just comes up on screen with little fanfare, so-so acting, direction, and camerawork, bad writing and some OK special effects (convincing gunshot wounds) alongside some really dumb ones (exploding cars, a'la the Pinto in Top Secret). I guess it's a tabula rasa - there's so little to it, so little invested in it emotionally or intellectually that you can project just about anything you want about sex and violence and find parts of the film to support that reading. I think it's unreadable, if not exactly unwatchable. Weird.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead -

Not too far from the previous film, actually, in terms of me wondering exactly why I'm watching it, though there's a lot more invested in making it a "good" picture. It's hard to care about the people here as their lives spiral further and further out of control. They've created the bad places they're in and as they get worse off - supported of course by tight direction by Sidney Lumet, a crafty script, and some good acting - you just watch it happen without getting invested in anybody. It can get better or worse for Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character and it's no sweat off my back. Same goes for everyone else here. I kind of enjoyed it in a gritty, pulp/crime-filmy way, but if I'd felt more invested in the people here I think it could've been riveting instead of just neat.

Tickets -

Charming omnibus from Ken Loach, Ermanno Ormi, and Abbas Kiarostami. Loach's set was my favorite, though I wouldn't definitively say that it's in any way "better" than the contributions of the other two, just that Kiarostami hasn't yet made a real mark on me (I've only seen A Taste of Cherry), never seen anything by Ormi (though he's far and away the most prolific of the three) and I really liked Loach's Sweet Sixteen (from which several actors reappear here). A train trip to Italy provides the foundation for several stories that don't exactly intertwine but more happen in proximity to each other and Loach's beats out the unresolved arguments between the young man and cranky old lady (who never really gains my sympathy for treating him as she does) and the reflections of missed opportunities that the professor of the first segment gives us. Loach's take is warmer and more vibrant than either and more fun and more involving for me in the end. Definitely worth seeing if you like the directors involved, but not necessarily a major statement by anybody, and in that it's like every other omnibus film I've ever seen.

MASH -

Yuck. I don't think I've ever seen a less humorous "comedy" of such high regard since Dr. Strangelove paraded out a bunch of footage of Peter Sellers working hard to make stale lines (written by the mostly dreary and humorless Stanley Kubrick) come to life. Here Altman and his cast throw down a bunch of ideas (or "plot" if you will) loosely around a medical camp in the Korean War and while I'm supposed to side with the young renegade doctors Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland, I just feel like they're assholes. Sutherland kind of gives me some things to grab onto, but mostly this made me think of a frat party - some smart ass guys of some privelege talk about sex and tits, get drunk a lot, try to get laid a lot, and worry about being homosexual but not about being racist, all the while feeling like they're bearing the flag of the counterculture beceause they stick it to "the man" at every opportunity. Forget that every figure of authority here is written like a one-note dickhead or uptight bitch rather than being given a fair shake at any point. Forget that his "Last Supper" here has no meaning in the context of the film, just another "fuck you" to whoever, unlike, say, Bunuel's in Viridiana. To me this is the 60's at its most self-congratulatory and most aggravating. And guess what came on my TV right afterward? Why, Dr. Strangelove, of course. Sigh....

Standard Operating Procedure -

Worth seeing, but as an Errol Morris film - where I'm used to him really getting below the surface of things - something of a disappointment. I mean, sure, if you thought that these kids were really a bunch of really bad people who operated in a vacuum and did truly horrible things to the people in the photographs, then yes, it will open your eyes. But if, as the title suggests and as I believe, you think that they worked within a culture where such behavior as the humiliation of their prisoners was par for the course - and more ominously suggested that it was completely mild by comparison - it will pretty much read out to the choir. I wish it took on higher targets, but probably it's pretty damn difficult to get that kind of information from high-level military while an operation is still underway. Even so, it's interesting, there's some enlightening stuff on screen, and it's made with Morris's usual panache and attention to detail. My only complaint with the filmmaking itself would be Danny Elfman's sometimes melodramatic score. Kinda makes you take things less seriously than you might otherwise be inclined to.

The Strangers -

A weird little film. Taken solely as something to really creep you out, it's really effective and well made. Keeps enough grounding in reality to make it seem plausible and really scary, yet uses enough cinematic technique to also amp it up and play around with you and make it really scary. Unfortunately, that's all it does. Not only does it not give you a reason why the tormentors did anything beyond "you were home," it gives you no real reason why you would get anything out of it beyond a few good scares and the creepy feeling that if you were in a similar location, this could happen to you too. I dunno, maybe now that I know what's gonna happen I can see how (or if) the failed engagement of the primary charcters plays into the rest of the film, what that frantic 911 call early on signifies, etc. I guess I just wanted more from it intellectually, and maybe even as a shocker. Once the scary stuff starts, it quickly escalates then kind of plateaus until the inevitable confrontations at the end of the film. It stays tense, but a little more dramatic ebb and flow might have made it even better. Not bad, but I was left a little wanting.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen -

If all Frank Capra's name means to you is sentimental Americana, you need to check this love story set in 1932 China. Political turmoil abounds and two American missionaries on the eve of their wedding go to a provincial town to save a group of orphans. Husband and wife (Barbara Stanwyck) are separated and the notorious General Yen (played brilliantly by the Denmark-born Nils Asther) saves the wife from turmoil and proceeds to hold her (somewhat) against her will, fascinated by her and her attraction to him, seemingly confident that she'll fall in love with him given time. You can call it melodrama if you want, but I never think that's a bad thing. Interracial love between a strong woman taken directly from her wedding day to a tradition-minded Chinese general set and shot in 1932 directed by the so-called tradition-minded Frank Capra? I'll take it. Excellent stuff all around in writing and acting, but I'd especially want to single out major props for the set design.

The Outrage -

Martin Ritt directs a film written by Michael Kanin that is adapted from Kanin's play (written with Fay Kanin) that's adapted from Kurosawa's screenplay that was in turn an adaptation of two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Too much lost in translation then for this film to possibly be good? I'd say that it ain't necessarily so, but in this case it surely is. Could be that someone could've made a good western version of Rashomon, but this isn't it. It's too stagy across the board for me and owes everything from cinematographic details to pacing to Kurosawa's version, which itself had some theatrical touches but managed to couch them in a naturalistic style when the principals got into their recollection of the events. Edward G. Robinson (especially) and Paul Newman fight hard against the tides to try and make something of this, but when you're bound to a film that owes everything down to nuances of dialogue, camera shots, and of course story to another film, how can it possibly work? And as pretty and James Wong Howe's work is here, I wish Ritt had taken a stronger position to shape the material more. It feels like Kanin's script didn't get changed and Ritt either stuck Howe with copying Kazuo Miyagawa's original camerawork or let Howe run the show as far as setting up all the cameras. Either way, this film just didn't work for me. I'd rather see Rashomon for the thousandth time.

Last House on the Left -

Once upon a time I thought this was among the most difficult of films to watch. I still find the experience unpleasant but well-done and quite affecting. I'll admit that I watched it again because David Hess, who stars here as the leader of the group of killers, is touring with the production of Sweeney Todd that just came to town. But I also wanted to see if it still hit me the way it used to, and for the most part, it did. The comic bumblings of the police feels out of place in a film that really hits it nightmarish stride pretty quickly and stays really fucking intense for the bulk of its running time. Craven is on record saying that while the film doesn't exactly draw an explicit parallel to Vietnam, the accounts of what was happening there gave them the sense of outrage to make the film as graphic and brutal as it is and that it was a cathartic experience for both cast and crew. So one could view it - as friends I respect have - as a cheesy, low budget slasher flick. Or you could view it as a complement to Winter Soldier, something that illuminates the horrific behavior the soldiers are describing, something that takes place within the world of the "Standard Operating Procedure" of dehumanization of other human beings and the offences ranging from humiliation to torture to rape and murder that can follow out from that. It's probably easy to guess where I sit within those thoughts.

The Piano Teacher -

Really fucking intense film about a masochist played to the hilt by Isabelle Huppert. Haneke seems to revel in placing you in the center of scenes of brutal and messed up situations that you feel like you shouldn't be witnessing. I have friends who call him cold, and I understand that though I'd call it "unflinching." This reminded me of some of the more intense moments of Bergman - Cries and Whispers for example - where you're privileged and also embarrassed to be watching scenes that feel so realistic and raw while touching on emotional turmoil that you hope never to experience in your own life. I find this kind of filmmaking very brave and very fascinating, but also something I really need to build myself up to watching. I'm up for watching more, just not right this second.

standard blogging procedure

Ten recent views (unedited - don't read if you don't like it long)

Diary of the Dead -
Romero's latest is a fine film indeed. Less ambitious than Land of the Dead and perhaps more successful as a consequence, since it hits its targets more fully. Then again, an explanation of the organizational principles of communism via a zombie film has to be a harder thing to put across than a satire on modern mass media. But compare to Redacted (which I liked, don't get me wrong) shows only that it's not so easy to do after all, and both Romero and DePalma have taken a semi-post-modern approach, deconstructing their topic while reveling in it (and Romero taking it a step further to even self-criticize, rather than a broad, blandly liberal condemnation).

Johnny Guitar -
Let me get this straight - a Western from the 50's where women are the primary power holders and movers of all the action? Wow. Color me impressed. And a minimal amount of the requisite gunplay - again mostly attributed to the women involved. Great story, great acting, very progressive film, as deeply feminist as any of Sirk's 50's classics. Crawford's character transcends the male-dominted society around her McCambridge's is bound to their power structure and vilified by both Crawford and the film. Gender studies film classes ought to have this in regular rotation.

Touch the Sound -
Documentary about Evelyn Glennie with Fred Frith often performing in tow (gotta pick up that record they're making throughout the film). Interesting look at her life and her philosophies of music-making. I like seeing how she works her way into other people's music and makes it work, as when she's not totally in synch with the Japanese performers at first but finds a way into their music. It's cool to see (and hear), but I'd still rather hear her music, see her live, etc. The doc on Goldsworthy is more valuable because I can't buy records of his works that do any justice to the deal thing. But this one's still fun.

Charulata -
Satyajit Ray marketed as Bollywood, which ridiculous (the menu screen offers songs as a choice (there's only 1 in the film)) but at least it's getting his films available in the west, so who cares? And this one's a good - maybe great - one in which a man who's been inattentive to his wife in favor of his work senses that he's losing her and makes the dual tragic mistakes of first inviting a (charming and younger) distant cousin to come visit and then asking another friend to take over his business so he can devote time to her. Anyone who's seen the Apu trilogy knows that Ray's work with interpersonal relationships is unparalleled in most of cinema and this is no exception.

Hi, Mom! -
Early Brian DePalma, back when he was known as a filmmaker with radical impulses, and if you've ever doubted it here's where you can learn that people who talk about the underlying subversive tensions of his later films (like me) aren't feeding you a line of bullshit. Bascially, Robert DeNiro plays an amateur filmmaker who thinks he can create a film of some merit based on viewing people's windows and behaviors out of his Greenwich Village apartment and seeks financing from an adult filmmaker. When he fails to produce the right level of prurient interest in his films, he begins working with a radical black arts group staging a play called "Be Black Baby" that aims to expose a middle class white audience to "the experience of being black." Trust me, the idea is taken about as far as you can push it on screen and weaves itself tightly into the themes of watching and voyeurism that pervade DePalma's work. It's almost like this plus Night of the Living Dead form a discussion between DePalma and Romero about race in America (with each offering up other ideas), and Redacted and Diary of the Dead offer up a dialogue about modern media overload. You think dePalma just does Hitchcock ripoffs and bad gangster films? You got a lot to learn, baby.

Melvin and Howard -
Charming Jonathan Demme trifle tells the story of Melvin Dummar, who gives a lift to an injured (and sick?) Howard Hughes and is later remembered in his will to the tune of 156 million dollars. It's nice the way Demme gets inside the actuality of lower-middle class life without seeming like he's slumming and the way Dummar is portrayed (presumably based on Demme's interaction with the real man, who appears in a walk-on). Lemat nails the red-blooded numbskull type perfectly, Robards is a great eccentric Hughes, Mary Steenbergen is great as Dummar's frequently-leaving wife. Overall, a nice little picture, of the kind that gave indie cinema a good name because it had a strange little story it wanted to tell, not because it thought it was so much smarter than mainstream cinema like too much of indie cinema today (and yes, I know Universal released it, but take a guess at what its budget probably was compared to major releases on 1980).

One, Two, Three -
Billy Wilder's strange little 1961 Cold War comedy in which Jimmy Cagney's Coca-Cola man in West Berlin is making inroads into East Berlin and the potential Communist market for his potential promotion to head of European operations. This is of course put into jeopardy by the company man's outrageous 17-year old daughter, a stalwart party member she connects with, and his own marital troubles (such as his ongoing language lessons with his bombshell secretary). A weird mix of patriotic display and cutting comments on consumer society that's kept moving at a quick clip by the kind of writing that makes Hollywood's Golden Age so golden (though this falls outside that era). Basically, it's a perfect little capsule of a moment that keep tongue firmly planted in cheek, doesn't really take sides even when it seem to, and doesn't mind making fun of itself, its stars, or anything else that crosses it (in 1961, jokes about missiles in Cuba were probably funny). Anyway, highly recommended.

Battle Royale -
Talked up so much to me that it was inevitably a disappointment. Onscreen violence ranked high, but as an idea, this didn't hold as much weight as it could - or should - have, which made the psychic violence - the ideas fucking with my head more than the gore I saw - pretty low overall. Tough to get a handle quickly on 42 kids and who you cared about. And even as it moved toward the ending which I felt in my gut was inevitable but thought in my head wouldn't happen (psychic violence woulda been higher if the game had played out as it was supposed to), I found that I didn't really know them or care much who lived or died since it was clearly presented as an outrageous fantasy that neither gave you much cause to side with the adults who made the hideous decision to make these games, or the youth who had to endure them. It's an interesting premise let down by ambition. And I guess if it had been delivered with fewer kids, or more readily focused on fewer of them, or even put across with a bit more flair, I would've liked it more. Or maybe I just didn't get past the hype.

Elephant -
Possibly Van Sant's best film. I wish I'd watched this and then Battle Royale - that film would've made much more sense after viewing this one, which hit me really hard and was what made me come up with the corny "psychic violence" idea because this one would rate about a 10 on that scale and really made me think of how much more a film hits you when it's got something of an ideology behind it rather than just a premise. I don't think it brings much to the discussion of Coumbine-styled violence except Van Sant's own theories about youth, but he's clearly in sympathy with all the kids portrayed here, not just some heroes who helped people, or the killers who gunned down their cruel tormentors. He's pretty in tune with what youth are like, due in large part, probably, to hiring a lot of non-professional actors and letting them improvise along his basic plot. A real heavy one and the best I've seen from him since Drugstore Cowboy.

The Dark Wind -
Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris goes for the very interesting subject of a murder committed on land that used to be jointly shared between the navajo and Hopi people, but is now split, and the case keeps taking Officer Jim Chee (played by Lou Diamond Phillips) back and forth between his own Navajo people, the Hopi, and white FBI agents (and others) who have some part to play in the case, which gets exponentially more complicated as it progresses. Maybe too complicated for a first-time narrative director who's a master of visual form in his own style which allows him a much greater structural control over how a story is told than a dense narrative like this that needs a certain amount of telling onscreen. The problems of this interesting but flawed film might also have something to do with Morris's decision to leave the film due to artistic differences with producer Robert Redford. Or maybe it was that boom mike hanging way down in the frame in a crucial scene late in the film? Anyway, I watched it, I liked a lot of it, but it's got issues.