by ·Comments Off on Tattooed Life (1965, Seijun Suzuki)

Fighting Elegy star Hideki Takahashi is Tetsu, an assassin whose life is saved by artist Kenji (star of Black Snow, not that one). Broke, our guys try to find anonymous manual work, but get tangled up with women and get themselves noticed (and implicated in murders and explosions). Kenji sketches the boss’s wife naked, which doesn’t go over well with the boss, and now Tetsu has to avenge his stupid brother. Suzuki brings mad style to the final ten minutes – which is an improvement over the one minute of mad style in Kanto Wanderer.

by ·Comments Off on Rock and Roll Shorts watched in March

La Disco Resplandece (2016, Chema Garcia Ibarra)

Kids hangin’ out movie, getting into harmless trouble (breaking into a former dance club, arriving sleepless and temp-tattooed to a serious ceremony the next day). Common directorial themes I can connect to the feature include UFOs, but unfortunately not cockatiels.

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Boogie Woogie Sioux (1942, Alex Lovy)

Not amusing enough to be worth all the dated racism, story of a native tribe on a hot day and the rain-dance band that fortunately is driving through town.

Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V:

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— ——- (A Rock and Roll Movie) (1967, Thom Andersen)

Fantastic montage of contemporary rock-related things, from the sensual (dance and performance) to mechanical (pressing plants and jukeboxes). Snippets of every rock single of the time, the sound cutting with the picture but never synced to what we see on the screen.

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Parade, or Here They Come Down Our Street (1952, Eames)

Toys and dolls and marionettes puppeted into a parade to the usual Sousa theme. This would appear to have been an influence on my former employer’s Boomerang network packaging. Gives the sense of a serious collector showing off his classic toys.

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Odessa Crash Test (2013, Norbert Pfaffenbichler)

Repeatedly/gratuitously showing the actual spine-crunching fate of a baby sent down the stone stairs in an uncontrolled buggy. Either my copy was glitchy or the filmmakers thought static and freezing would add more fun to their experiment.

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I Thought The World of You (2022, Kurt Walker)

Wow, a short doc about Lewis. No spoken words, just written messages on screen, light sound design gradually building to the full songs – a more delicate take on the rock biography for an elusive subject. Apparently this is what “hauntology” is.

by ·Comments Off on Henry Fonda for President (2024, Alexander Horwath)

Corey Atad:

It works for several reasons. The Fonda family’s history in the colonies dating back to the 1600s, for one, giving the project a remarkable historical breadth. But there’s also something to Fonda being born as The Movies begin to take shape, with a career spanning the real golden eras of Hollywood filmmaking. He becomes, in the context of this film, a figure through which to understand America’s good spirit, and how it lost out to America’s evil delusions.

After convincing us for three hours that Henry Fonda represents America itself, weaving film and interview clips and bringing in political history and Henry’s outspoken actor kids, the doc closes on a shot of pelicans, affirming its greatness.

by ·Comments Off on The Ambulance (1990, Larry Cohen)

Having a difficult movie month here. Seijun Suzuki and The Cannibals were the best movies I’ve watched lately, but this one was the smartest decision. How do you follow up those, plus some major docs, a Jerry Lewis, the Arbuckles, the end of the Szulkin apocalypse series, and my big Cinema Scope roundup? With some brilliant late Cohen nonsense, of course.

Gang:

Janine Turner (Northern Exposure, Cliffhanger) collapses while large-faced Eric Roberts is harassing her. But Eric is no casual harasser, he’s a true stalker, devoted to figuring out why this girl (whose last name he doesn’t know) seems to have disappeared from the medical system after being taken away in a weird ambulance. He goes to a real hospital where he enlists his reporter roommate Red Buttons, and involves police officers James Earl Jones and Megan Gallagher, before uncovering a clonus-horror conspiracy of secret medical experiments and pilfered body parts.

Eric and Red:

Vint:

Coincidence? Cop Richard Bright was in Panic at Needle Park with Alan Vint, and in this movie they go searching for the ambulance drivers with only a uniform that says VINT as a clue. The story is nonsense and Roberts is a nut, but it plays well. Terribly choreographed fight scene between the ambulance drivers and a street gang. Eric was some years after Star 80 and Runaway Train, not long before he started appearing in 10+ movies per year. Eric plays a Marvel Comics artist under Stan Lee, in Stan’s first non-doc appearance – his second being Mallrats. Megan was in a Costas Mandylor movie, oh no. The evil doctor who ends up kidnapping Red Buttons as well as Janine had previously brought on the AI-pocalypse in Colossus: The Forbin Project. Most important is the incredible James Earl Jones performance, hammy but dignified, a must-see.

Dignity, even in death:

Uh-oh, ambulance:

by ·Comments Off on OBEX (2025, Albert Birney)

In 1987 a middle-aged guy loves to spend time on the computer. He and his dog watch A Nightmare On Elm Street on broadcast television then “wake up” inside a customized fantasy videogame, rescuing a guy with a TV head and traveling by map. Once the movie gets into game mode, I flashed back to Hundreds of Beavers – which was more ambitious but had totally different manic vibes to this movie’s good-natured dreamscape.

by ·Comments Off on Yumeji (1991, Seijun Suzuki)

Our guy is a notorious artist of sexy paintings (pop star Kenji Sawada has made good movie choices, playing leads in Hiruko the Goblin, Mishima, and Happiness of the Katakuris). His pretty young beloved is sick at home with her parents, wants to elope but not right now, so Yumeji enjoys a heavy romp with a prostitute, picks up another artist’s model, and becomes obsessed with a widow(?) and her bizarre story, until her husband (the crazy guy from Zigeunerweisen, even crazier) arrives and chases everyone around.

The Women of Yumeji: Covering her mouth tuberculosively is Hikono, who starred in Strange Circus. Center standing is model Oyo from a hitman movie called Pornostar and center seated/smiling is Mrs. Wakiya, who later starred in similar sounding Two Portraits of Miyagino (artist/prostitute love triangle, disappearance, kabuki-style sets). These two seem to have swapped personalities for this portrait, but I haven’t misidentified them unless they also swapped kimonos. I’ll dishonorably join the rest of the web in not being able to identify the others, but far left is the prostitute he’s with at the beginning.

I’m (re)watching these out of order, Yumeji coming a decade after Zigeunerweisen and Kagero-za – the cinema world loves a trilogy. Extremely loosely based on true events, the movie also plays fast and loose with dream/reality, life/death. Despite the apparent genre of “period artist biography,” it’s unpredictable and bizarre, with something crazy in nearly every shot.

Sean Rogers in Cinema Scope:

While Kagero-za ends with an unexpected and unnerving glimpse into some kind of afterlife, Yumeji begins a little more reassuringly, with events that soon get explicitly figured as a dream — even if the protagonist dreams of a duel in which he gets shot in the head. After all, the yume from Yumeji also means “dream,” as the renowned real-life painter Yumeji Takehisa muses toward the end of the film, which fictionalizes a period in his life from around 1918 … As in Zigeunerweisen and Kagero-za, the film closes with the prospect of Yumeji’s transportation across a body of water to a dimension of death or dream, this time ferried there by “the devil” Onimatsu.

by ·Comments Off on Festival (1967, Murray Lerner)

Another concert compilation film, this one taken from multiple years of folk fests.

PP&M sing their hit song about having a hammer and a couple Dylan tunes, but more importantly Mary appears to have two moles on her neck in a vampire bite pattern. Seeger sings about creamed corn, some bluegrass guys tear it up, some blues guys chill it out. Joan Baez gets the best lines during an autograph session and an after-show interview, including telling fans “don’t get so hysterical,” which hits hard in this beatlemanic era. She’s down to earth in a film otherwise full of statements like “you don’t choose to play music, music chooses to play you.”

Blue Ridge Mountain Dancers:

Movie stops dead while a couple of guys attempt to explain the blues, less successfully than the Edward Bland movie explained jazz. I appreciate the continuation of a TNT Show theme by showing the white audience clap out-of-time with Howlin’ Wolf. Lerner had a perfect career, making nothing but rock docs. One of the DPs later shot more than one Dick Sargent thriller.

by ·Comments Off on The Cannibals (1988, Manoel de Oliveira)

Leonor falls in love with goth Luis Miguel, then is surprised when he acts all goth on their wedding night. The mismatched couple acts all doomed and stoic, allowing her stalker Diogo Doria and the narrator Oliveira Lopes to be pop-eyed loons in the opera’s background.

I had decided that the title must be a metaphor, but for what? Then at the end of the second act, all the lead characters kill themselves, and a new group of men is introduced, who eat Luis Miguel, thinking him part of the bridal party feast after he’d hurled his own limbless torso into the fireplace.

Watching Oliveira films mainly makes one wish to watch more Oliveira films. Looks like good options at the moment are: the earliest stuff through 1964, the latest stuff post-Belle Toujours, and Party – everything else apparently has new restorations that aren’t out on video yet.

by ·Comments Off on The Big Clock (1948, John Farrow)

Ray Milland is a bad husband to Maureen O’Sullivan, working for toxic boss Charles Laughton. When the boss threatens to fire and blacklist Ray from the publishing industry if he leaves for a long-delayed honeymoon, Ray responds by standing up his wife and getting drunk with some strange girl (Rita Johnson, Ray’s fiancee in The Major and the Minor). Coincidentally the strange girl is the boss’s mistress, whom the boss murders that same night, calling in his cleaner Steve (Human Duplicator George Macready) and his top crime investigator Ray (still 15 years away from acquiring his X-RAY EYES).

Ray runs around finding clues that all point to himself, while everyone he met that night is being generous to him and his wife, understandably, is not. Bringing together the two greatest movies of the past decade, Laughton is terrific as the wicked publisher, and he’s inordinately proud of his clockwork device. Fighting his way out from the big clock, Ray incapacitates the henchman, and to everyone’s horror, he stops the big clock. The boss runs off shooting in a frenzy and falls down an elevator shaft.

The Big Sleeves:

Remade once with Yves Montand, again with Kevin Costner. The producer later wrote a pile of James Bond movies, the DP had recently shot three great Preston Sturges films, and the director and lead actress had recently produced Mia.