by ·Comments Off on As Tears Go By (1988, Wong Kar-Wai)

Maggie Cheung has health problems, comes to stay with her older cousin Andy Lau, a loanshark enforcer who acts completely recklessly along with his fuckup buddy Jacky Cheung. This movie and Days of Being Wild could definitely have swapped titles.

Ronald Wong (sort of an HK Bud Cort) manages to get out of the gangster life, marries, is given a bunch of money. Jacky fails hard in every direction though, tries to quit and run a food stand but ends up where he came from: getting the shit beaten out of him until he’s rescued by Andy. These two have their moments of brilliance, but by refusing to play the gangster game by the rules, soon everyone is tired of their shit. Crazy Tony (Alex Man) is set up as the “bad guy” who wants our heroes dead, but that’s all our heroes deserve, and soon what they get. Meanwhile, a bit of a love story has developed between Maggie and Andy, set to a Chinese version of “Take My Breath Away” and a 1980’s synth score. But just when Andy thought he was out, the bastards pulled him back in, then shot him in the head.

Jackie on right:

Ang Wong only has two scenes, but makes an impression:

by ·Comments Off on Honor de Cavelleria (2006, Albert Serra)

“You have to follow my path even if you don’t understand it.”

Don Quixote thinks he’s a knight, enlists his neighbor as squire. Pancho is sleepy and despondent, Quixote is belligerent, but both are quite slow and seemingly dull-witted. Time goes slowly. Some nice natural-light photography, though.

Shot in part by Eduard Grau (A Single Man, Finisterrae). Mark Peranson apparently made a Serra making-of doc, but it’s about Birdsong despite being named Waiting for Sancho.

M. Peranson:

Honor de Cavalleria is a modernist, materialist, experiential film made with a supreme amount of confidence. It’s one of those films that periodically appears in a hostile, conformist environment – like a UFO landing – and causes viewers and critics to ponder how exactly films operate on spectators. … it is as if we are eavesdropping on the real inspirations for the dreamer Quixote and the earth-bound Sancho as they moseyed across the gorgeous landscape centuries ago, their language less important than the movement of their bodies.

Serra, who has a degree in Hispanic Philology:

We wanted to make a film on idealism. What then was the starting point of such a film? A beautiful novel dealing with that theme, that is to say Don Quixote. … This austere and conceptual atmosphere [of Bresson and Bergman] interested us. Young filmmakers usually have the stereotype of the urban film, current stories, themes dealing with young people. In order to go against that, we insisted on the classic film tradition, different from that of nowadays’ young cinema. We wanted to make a film poles apart from current cinema.

Serra again, on the look: “It’s shot in Mini DV, not HD or any high-end bullshit. … I don’t like the definition to be that high.” He quotes Lisandro Alonso and Blissfully Yours as influences.

by ·Comments Off on Rififi (1955, Jules Dassin)

Tony (Jean Servais of Le Plaisir and Thomas the Impostor) is a down-on-his-luck gambler (is there any other kind of gambler?) just out of jail. His ex-girl Mado has taken up with dangerous gangster Pierre Grutter. But Tony’s family-man brother Jo has a plan for a jewelry heist that will get ’em back on top, so they recruit a couple more guys.

L-R: Jo, Mario, Tony, Cesar (Dassin himself):

What follows is one of the best heist scenes in the movies – a half-hour of tense work with no music or dialogue, tunnelling through floor of an above apartment (using inverted umbrella to catch their own dust), disabling alarm by spraying its insides with a fire extinguisher, then drilling the safe, all barely in time as outside, police notice the getaway car.

Bunuelian nightclub – set designer Alexandre Trauner worked on both pictures:

Viviane (Magali Noel, a Fellini hottie in Satyricon and Amarcord) singing the film’s theme song:

Safe escape is made, but Grutter and his gang (including a dopehead brother) know who’s behind the heist and figure they can take Tony’s ramshackle gang. Safecracker Cesar is kidnapped after giving a pocketed jewel to Viviane (she thinks it’s fake anyway), later executed by Tony. Mario (Robert Manuel of La Vie est un roman) and his wife Ida are killed by the Grutters, and Jo’s young son is kidnapped. Some confusion ensues and Jo gets himself killed after his brother has already retrieved the kid. Great scene as Tony speeds home with the kid and money in back seat, outrunning his fatal gunshot wound.

Tony drives his nephew home:

Cesar death scene:

Dassin’s triumphant euro-comeback after getting blacklisted from Hollywood, winning him best director at Cannes.

J. Hook on the heist: “It is a scene you’ve seen before (shameless imitators have been cannibalizing it for decades), but you will never see it so purely, respectfully done as here.” His article is nice, gushing about the movie’s greatness then finally revealing how and why that greatness might have come about.

Tony with Mado:

Gangsters at Mario and Ida’s house:

by ·Comments Off on The End of Time (2012, Peter Mettler)

A contemplative picture book encompassing hippies and scientists, farms and particle accelerators, meditation and raves. One of those docs that contains its own making-of, showing outtakes and crew. Overall I liked it slightly less than the CocoRosie song of the same title. The lava footage is terrific, though.

Hot lava:

Cat in field / Reviewing footage of cat in field (mouse-over):
image

I watched the director’s preferred PAL version, rather than the U.S. release, which is five minutes longer and Cinema Scope says Mettler found “painfully slow.” And speaking unironically (?) about time constraints while filming a documentary about perceptions of time: “Compared to a model for TV or the internet, the feature-film model is fairly time-restrictive. It has its own laws and you have to obey them.” A year after this interview, Mettler is probably aware that Vine is shortening generally-tolerated length of online videos.

Best parking garage ever:

Crouching tiger:

Mettler: “Even now, if you ask me what the structure of the film is, I find it fairly obtuse. The way it’s structured doesn’t add up to something familiar to me.” This is on purpose, letting each scene play its own way instead of trying to conform his documentary footage to a framework.

Ant pulling grasshopper:

Particle detectors:

by ·Comments Off on Silent Light (2007, Carlos Reygadas)

Deliberately-paced movie that aims hard for transcendence, opening and closing with real-time sunrise/sunset scenes (beautiful, with a Last Days-paced creeping camera). Jay Kuehner in Cinema Scope: “It’s a staggering shot, marked not only by duration but by the howling of unseen animals, a collective primal roar that disturbs the scene’s serenity.”

I wish the person introducing at the High hadn’t named the film’s greatest influence (Ordet) because then I spent those long, slow shots (but not static shots – one memorable spinning scene tracks Johan’s truck driving in circles) wondering when someone would die and be resurrected. That would be sad Johan’s even-sadder wife Esther, who dies of a broken heart during a rainstorm. I was surprised that it’s Johan’s affair Marianne who touches Esther and summons her back to life.

Jay Kuehner:

However Silent Light eschews the kinetics of narrative, it is by conception not without dramatic stakes. Johan’s tear-streaked face communicates a sense of pain only in the knowledge that his newfound love could harn his wife and alienate his family, consequences which Reygadas leaves unexplored. Is this a result of the director’s immanent design? If so, it’s teasingly realized in a gorgeous sequence featuring Johan and family bathing in a natural pool, the camera adhering to the children’s simple gestures as if nothing more important existed to them outside the moment – and likewise to the film outside the frame. It’s a scene of self-succifiency that produces meaning only in context with others, which bestow upon its small familial utopia a threat of impending loss. That’s enough to make a grown man cry.

by ·Comments Off on Mr. Lucky (1943, H.C. Potter)

A rah-rah-war-effort movie disguised as something else. Potter’s follow-up to the great Hellzapoppin’ is a letdown in the comedy and unpredictability departments, but solid on the drama and romance – Katy agrees, a decent flick overall. Cary Grant plays a Harry Lime type, a gambler and draft-dodger who takes advantage of a woman who loves him (Laraine Day of the Dr. Kildare series), a war relief campaign, and a dead man with whom he swaps identities, all to raise money for a gambling cruise. At the end he ought to be killed, but you can’t kill Cary Grant so he’s redeemed by love instead.

Amusements: Grant and his assistant Crunk learn to knit in order to impress Laraine and set up a running joke. And the movie’s lasting legacy is that it introduced Katy to rhyming slang.

by ·Comments Off on White Dog (1982, Samuel Fuller)

Great movie, not badly dated except for Kristy’s 1980’s headband and boyfriend (Jameson Parker of Prince of Darkness). Written by Romain Gary, based on a true story (his wife Jean Seberg found and took home a “white dog”). After Kristy McNichol finds the “insane” dog and bonds with it, she realizes she’s got a racist killing machine on her hands and gets an obsessive Keys (Paul Winfield, couple years before The Terminator) to deprogram the dog. Things go wrong: a man is killed at church, finally the dog injures Keys’s partner Carruthers (Burl Ives) and has to be shot. Best scene is when Kristy confronts the original owner, a pleasant old man with two sweet daughters, the deceptively gentle-looking face of racism.

Cameos by Sam (though there are also Sam-surrogates, cigar-chomping old men), Christa (as a capitalist veterinary nurse) and Dick Miller (as a trainer working for Carruthers and Keys). Nice, long interview on the DVD with cowriter Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential), producer Jon Davison (a Joe Dante and Paul Verhoeven associate) and Christa.

J. Rosenbaum:

As in the fables of Aesop and La Fontaine, the hero of Fuller’s parable may be a dog, but the subject is the human race. .. The dog is a tragic scapegoat, neither racist nor antiracist in any human sense. .. Close-ups and subjective camera movements repeatedly place us in intimate proximity with the physical world as the dog perceives it, so that he’s not merely “a four-legged time bomb” (as Julie’s boyfriend puts it, in characteristic Fuller-ese) but also an animal whose perceptions we’re invited to share. .. Like the children in Fuller’s war films, he’s the ultimate metaphor for the world we engender and nourish and ruin and try to redeem, a cause for some hope as well as despair.

by ·Comments Off on Run of the Arrow (1957, Samuel Fuller)

One of Fuller’s final-shot ruminations – that the moment a war ends, killing turns from a heroic act into a criminal one. Feeling oppressed by the North and betrayed by his own losing side, an Irish-Confederate soldier (Rod Steiger, warmonger general of Mars Attacks!) joins a Sioux tribe against all whites. He gets guidance from doomed scout Walking Coyote (Jay Flippen, father-figure crook in The Killing), falls for a girl called Yellow Mocassin (Spanish superstar Sara Montiel, overdubbed by Angie Dickinson), and tricks suspicious Sioux warrior Crazy Wolf. A bunch of whites-vs-natives twists and betrayals later, Steiger and Moccasin leave the tribe, deciding to try their hand with the new USA instead.

Kiss Me Deadly star Ralph Meeker plays the Union officer shot twice by the same bullet (long story), and “newcomer Charles Bronson” plays a Sioux chief. There were actual Sioux players in the film, but relegated to smaller roles.

Sam:

The boys at RKO loved my yarn and gave me a green light to produce the picture the way I wanted. Indians would be depicted as a community of people with their own rules and rituals, not – as in most studio movies – like a pack of marauding killers. .. I think [Rod Steiger] earned more on that picture than I did. After all, I was only the writer, director and coproducer.

by ·Comments Off on 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006, Corneliu Porumboiu)

Another drag of a Romanian movie making some sort of opaque political statement, this one by 50 Under 50 filmmaker Porumboiu. Won a couple of awards at Cannes the year before 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days had everyone talking about Romania.

A TV studio cameraman says handheld camera is “the new thing” until the presenter tells him “put it on the tripod before I whop you with it!” That might be Porumboiu’s thoughts on the matter, since his film is shot with locked-down cameras, drab framings through doorways. The program within the film is portrayed as pretty half-assed, with focus problems, making the uninteresting-looking main feature look more competent by comparison. Indiewire says the compositions are “elegant” and “lovely,” so they saw something I didn’t.

12:08 is what time president Ceausescu fled the capital by helicopter on 12/22/1989. On the anniversary, TV call-in host Virgil Jderescu invites a couple of guests (beardy prof Manescu and old man Piscoci) to discuss whether their small town participated in the revolution or simply followed it, defined as whether there were people in the square before or after 12:08. No serious conclusions are drawn, and at the end everyone shuts up and watches snow fall.

Jay Kuehner in Cinema Scope:

This quietly bravura set-piece manages to be narratively torpid and aesthetically flat, but nevertheless conceptually rich; it’s a sublime metaphor for the uses of history, how people make it as much as it makes people, and how received narratives often entail multiple and conflicting views. .. That Porumboiu stages the “action” on live television is surely not coincidental, as impromptu broadcasts from the seized television stations relayed the progress of the revolution, up to and including Ceausescu and his wife’s bloody end.

AV Club says the points are “whether a revolution can happen if nobody risks anything, and whether the long memories of small-town stalwarts can be both a blessing and a curse.”