by ·Comments Off on Blue is the Warmest Color (2013, Abdellatif Kechiche)

Here’s an email I wrote on the subject:

Blue is the Saddest Movie

Figured I’d see Blue one day last weekend and 12 Years a Slave the next day, as a sort of controversial critic-bait double-feature. Was very skeptical of Blue for the first hour because it’s a coming-of-age young-love story completely shot in handheld close-ups. Not my thing. Also the director comes off as quite pretentious in interviews, plus there are multiple controversies (extended sex scenes causing a NC-17 rating, the actresses turning on the filmmaker, the author of the source story hating the movie) so it seems like a hype movie that’ll be soon forgotten.

But – spoiler alert here – the movie is about this girl who falls for an older girl, they’re together for a long time, young girl isn’t getting enough attention after some years, cheats, is kicked out, they break up. It’s a three-hour movie, and the last hour or so is dealing with the aftermath of this break-up. It’s not the most emotionally complex three-hour movie about a teenage girl I’ve seen lately (that would be Margaret, my runner-up to Holy Motors as best movie of 2012) – it’s very straightforward. It’s a love-at-first-sight movie where the relationship doesn’t last but the love does, which might make it the most depressing movie of the year, at least. The handheld close-ups and controversies aside, it’s a movie that lingers in your mind for a long time – I’m getting choked up just thinking about it again. A massive accomplishment, no wonder it won best picture at Cannes.

by ·Comments Off on UPA Jolly Frolics disc 1 (1949-1952)

Robin Hoodlum (1949, John Hubley)

“I rob from the rich and I give to the poor. I never give a thing to the middle class.”

I guess the UPA revolution started late – this seems like a typical WB/Disney-style character cartoon full of decent jokes (the newly-appointed sheriff Crow and prince john always haggling over payment and due dates) and tired ones (the English sure enjoy teatime). Interesting that Robin is portrayed as a fox, some 25 years before the Disney feature. He’s also kind of terrible with a bow and arrow, another unusual choice. The first UPA short to be oscar-nominated, beaten by Hanna-Barbera’s The Little Orphan.

Nobody helping Robin because it is teatime:

The Magic Fluke (1949, John Hubley)

Good one, story of a a conductor Fox who dumps his one-man-band Crow partner for the big time, until crow gets well-intentioned revenge by getting his ex-buddy a magic wand as conductor’s baton.

Exceptional-looking, and they saved time and effort by having the crow narrate via thoughts sans lipsync. Predates Tex Avery’s great Magical Maestro by a couple years.

Horn section becomes rabbits:

Ragtime Bear (1949, John Hubley)

This one introduced the world to the blind, gruesome-looking Mr. Magoo and his accident-prone son Waldo, who dies early in a hiking accident. A bluegrass-fan bear masquerades as the son (we learn that banjos basically play themselves) while one-joke Magoo quickly wears out the blindness gimmick. Characters talk over each other Popeye-style. But wait, Waldo lives, only to get immediately shotgun-blasted by his father, who attempts revival via vase-of-water in the face. Weird movie.

Bearskin rug in the line of fire:

Punchy de Leon (1950, John Hubley)

Another rival Fox/Crow cartoon, voyaging to Florida in 1503 seeking the (coin-operated) fountain of youth for a vain king of Spain. I enjoy the rivalry thing, and it’s a step up from Ragtime Bear no matter how you look at it, but no real good gags in this one. I’m starting to notice the abstract backdrops that Leonard Maltin told me to look out for.

Flash as the fountain water restores the king:

The Miner’s Daughter (1950, Robert Cannon)

Ol’ prospector and homely daughter have no luck mining gold, then Harvard man turns up next door with fancy modern techniques and strikes it rich. Miner’s daughter lures him over with the smell of Boston baked beans, and they get happily, wealthily married. Dialogue is sung but their mouths don’t move. The instrumental variations on My Darling Clementine are nice, but no decent gags except for Harvard man’s fully-furnished inflatable house and its umbrella-punctured demise.

Harvard man refusing to save the distressed maiden:

Giddyap (1950, Art Babbitt)

Sad horse-drawn ice delivery cart is getting beaten by modern motorized ice delivery cars. Flashback: their horse Jack “the Hoofer” used to be a famous dancer before the movies came along and ruined showbusiness. Cart driver’s daughter gets an idea: put the horse on television (which recently came along and ruined the movies). Happy ending: ice delivery guy now uses a helicopter to beat the car. Implications: embrace changing technology to help your business succeed, and one day we’ll all drive helicopters.

Tapdancing horse vs. period picture:

The Popcorn Story (1950, Art Babbitt)

Nebraska-set story of Wilbur Shucks, who invented popcorn but instead of eating it tried to harness its explosive power to fuel a rube goldberg shoeshine machine, narrated by the town fancypants as he dedicates a statue in Wilbur’s honor.

The Family Circus (1951, Art Babbitt)

Patsy is jealous that the new baby gets all daddy’s attention, so she destroys daddy’s stuff, injures him and torments the cat. Finally daddy gets a clue and decides love is the answer. Dream sequence saved a few bucks using childlike drawings and 2fps animation.

Gerald McBoing Boing (1951, Robert Cannon)

Seen this a few times before, a great one.

Georgie and the Dragon (1951, Robert Cannon)

More actioney than the others. Georgie brings home a baby dragon which grows huge in a matter of minutes while he tries to hide it from his strict father. Meanwhile the movie beats its Scottish setting over the viewer’s head constantly.

The Wonder Gloves (1951, Robert Cannon)

Good one – no dialogue except in the framing story of a guy telling his nephew about the time he discovered magic boxing gloves and accidentally went from boxing gym janitor to world champion.

The Oompahs (1952, Robert Cannon)

Generation-gap music story, big band vs. jazz, as personified by a family of horns.

Rooty Toot Toot (1952, John Hubley)

Musical courtroom drama based on the classic song Frankie and Johnny. J has been shot to death in a bar – the bartender and another girl testify they were nearby and that his girlfriend F killed him in a jealous rage. Defense lawyer tells a tale of poor lovely innocent F, and J’s accidental suicide. Jury acquits, F sees her suitor/lawyer dancing with the girl from the bar and shoots him dead in court. Wow.

by ·Comments Off on Seconds (1966, John Frankenheimer)

Why have I gotten Seconds and Targets confused? I wondered why Boris Karloff wasn’t listed in the opening titles, figured he’d be an unannounced surprise guest star or something. No matter.

Shot by madman James Wong Howe:

Arthur (John Randolph) is a middle-aged married guy, gets a call from his long-dead friend, follows instructions and ends up caught in a secret surgical cult. Prominently-eyebrowed Jeff Corey (sheriff in the Butch Cassidy movies) lays out Arthur’s options: let them remake him as Rock Hudson, or release him along with the life-destroying sex tape they shot while he was drugged.

Post-surgery, “Tony” (Rock Hudson) lives on a lovely beach house with a dedicated butler/watcher (Wesley Addy, Ralph Meeker’s disapproving boss in Kiss Me Deadly), works on his paintings all day. This plus massive surgery is what $30k bought in the sixties? He attends a naked wine orgy with the neighbors but doesn’t really feel like socializing, and has a tendency to shout about his former life when drunk – turns out all his neighbors are also middle-aged losers with new bodies and lives (Reborns).

John Frankensteimer:

Rock meets a cute girl (Salome Jens, title star of Angel Baby) on the beach, but this and the parties and paintings aren’t cutting it, so he sneaks off to check on his wife (this is a year after becoming Rock) and is recaptured by the company and united with his “dead” friend (Murray Hamilton, mayor of Jaws). Both Rock and his friend “died” in their previous lives in some awful, disfiguring accident, some dope’s body substituted for their own. Now they waste their days in an office, waiting to be the dope body for some other guy’s midlife crisis dream-come-true. Depressing movie, kinda.

Frankenheimer, a few years after Manchurian Candidate, gets a neat effect by attaching the camera to walking actors, exactly as done in Pi. Supposedly this is the third in a “paranoia trilogy”, with Seven Days in May the middle piece.

2046!

D. Sterritt:

When much of American pop culture was infatuated with the swinging, psychedelic 1960s, John Frankenheimer was focused on the decade’s darker side—the sour aftertaste of McCarthyism, the expanding military-industrial complex, the growing sense that technology might be controlling us instead of the other way around. … An early clue to the Company’s sinister nature is its shifty way of inducing Arthur to sign up. Instead of inveigling him with Faustian rewards of sex, glamour, and fulfillment, the Company stresses the emptiness of his current life, making him gaze into its vacant, lusterless eyes until he’ll do anything to look away.

by ·Comments Off on The Black Cat (1934, Edgar G. Ulmer)

“Strange about the cat – Joan seemed so curiously affected when you killed it.”
“That was coincidence, I think.”

Another in the great tradition of Hollywood movies starting with great actors playing interesting characters in cool locations, then throwing a bland romantic couple into the middle of it. They’re not as bad as your usual bland romantic couple, these two. David Manners was Harker in Dracula and a main dude in The Mummy with Karloff, and Jacqueline Wells had just costarred in a Tarzan movie.

Lugosi is a Hungarian psychiatrist, a prisoner of war for 15 years, free again and visiting his old friend Karloff, a great Austrian architect. Lugosi plans to confront Karloff and demand back his wife and daughter, whom he suspects Karloff has stolen from him – but he brings along the couple, having just survived a car crash. Jacqueline stumbles in all dazed and woozy, and they give her a narcotic and tell her to sleep (“SLEEEEEP”), excellent medical advice.

“Are we not both the living dead?” Lugosi (whose character name sounds too much like Fetus) has “an intense and all-consuming horror of cats,” which I suspect will come up again later in the movie. Lugosi’s daughter turns out to be alive, 18 years old and sleeping with Karloff. Karloff is also a satanist, keeping Lugosi’s wife’s body suspended in his basement. So they sit down for a game of chess – winner gets to keep the body. It’s a ludicrous movie, and closes with a meta-joke about its own melodramatic craziness.

The beginning and end of Ulmer’s major-studio Hollywood career – he had a major hit but fell in love with the wrong girl and spent the rest of his life on the specialty and b-movie circuits. Before this, he’d done set design for Fritz Lang (Die Nibelungen, M, Metropolis, Spies) and production and art design for Murnau (Tabu, Last Laugh, Sunrise, 4 Devils) – so the expressionist look to The Black Cat wasn’t just Hollywood ripping off a hot trend, but a 20-year vet of great German cinema importing his own style.

Found a good article by “The Nitrate Diva” about the WWI references and emotional resonance within the film. The story was “suggested” by the Edgar Allen Poe story which was more faithfully adapted by Stuart Gordon recently.

by ·Comments Off on 12 Years a Slave (2013, Steve McQueen)

Finally, justice for Chiwetel. McQueen’s follow-up to Shame, which I skipped. I was bracing for a no-holds-barred art film, but it’s closer to a typical Hollywood drama than Hunger was, based on the real guy’s memoir and adapted by John Ridley (Three Kings, Red Tails).

Chiwetel is kidnapped by circus tricksters and sold to Django Unchained vet Chris Berry, who immediately kills fellow slave Omar and throws him overboard. Chiwetel is auctioned by Paul Giamatti to relatively-decent Benedict Cumberbatch, but pisses off watcher Paul Dano and so is sent to Fassbender’s place. Fass is fucking female slave Lupita Nyong’o and Fass’s wife Sarah Paulson knows it – guess which of those three will get the shit end of the stick (or the whip). Chiwetel seeks help from Garret Dillahunt, who sells him out, finally gets it from forward-thinking Canadian Brad Pitt.

Amazing story, certainly a well-made and well-acted movie, but the closing titles leave things depressingly unresolved and one yearns for some Django-style payback. IMDB lists the previous adaptation, starring Avery Brooks of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine fame, as a comedy/drama!

by ·Comments Off on Les Anges du peche (1943, Robert Bresson)

Like Rivette, Bresson started his feature career with a nun movie. This is an interesting one in light of his later movies about crime and punishment. On prison trips, young nun Anne-Marie (Renee Faure, lovestruck globemaker’s daughter in L’assassinat du Père Noël) becomes obsessed with Therese (Jany Holt, the prostitute in Renoir’s Lower Depths), trying to get her to join the convent – which she does after her release, but not before shooting a man to death as revenge for her imprisonment.

So, Anne-Marie gets ever more intense towards the woman she thinks she has saved, and Therese is extremely moody, never fitting in at the convent since she’s really using it to hide from her latest crime.

Senses:

For her disruption of convent life Anne-Marie is expelled, but secretly returns nightly to pray at the tomb of her order’s founder. When she becomes deathly ill, she is discovered and readmitted to the fold; and, upon her death, Thérèse undergoes a change of heart, delivering herself to the police and to her just punishment. .. This route to Anne-Marie’s saintly fulfilment and Thérèse’s transformation passes through continually ambiguous terrain, in which will, destiny, and chance become indistinguishable, and in which saintliness and criminality not only work side by side but mingle.

Head nun Sylvie was in Le Corbeau the same year, and one of the others – I get them confused – was Marie-Hélène Dasté, Jean Dasté’s wife and a stage actress for playwright/novelist Giraudoux, who adapted the story for this film.

Public Affairs (1934)

Princess defies king, flies to nearby Crogandy to marry their clown chancellor, who gets a few funny bits in this visually indistinct, silly-ass comedy. A pretty good extended contagious-yawn joke leads to a plane crash, then everyone in town falls asleep (probably not a Paris qui dort reference). We follow the chancellor from a statue unveilling to a firehouse demonstration to the launch of a ship, with Marcel Dalio (the marquis in Rules of the Game and Frenchy in To Have and Have Not) playing most of the movie’s roles besides the romantic leads.

by ·Comments Off on Let’s Scare Jessica To Death (1971, John D. Hancock)

This was on one of those lists of the best-ever scary movies, and it was Shocktober, so I watched it despite the title. A moody, mystical drama with poor dubbing and silly keyboard music, a would-be predecessor to Altman’s Images, if there was ever any doubt that Jessica is dangerously crazy. I guess the movie might be saying that the town is actually overrun with vampires let by a 100-year-old young girl, but I didn’t buy that interpretation, preferred to think the crazy girl killed her husband while thinking he’s a monster.

Dark-haired crazy Jessica (Zohra Lampert, Ben Gazzara’s wife in Opening Night) goes to her cabin with balding husband Duncan (Barton Heyman, a doctor in The Exorcist) and their super-70’s friend Woody (Kevin O’Connor, a detective in Special Effects), and they meet Meg Ryan-looking squatter Emily (Mariclare Costello, Emilio Estevez’s mom in Nightmares), who almost immediately proposes “let’s have a seance”.

The kids go antiquing in town, where the locals all hate them for their youthful sideburns. Antique dealer mentions “flowers of evil” and lines from Pigface’s Washingmachine Mouth EP bounce into my head. Then an hour later someone whispers “I’m still alive” and I realize it’s no coincidence. Emily seduces Duncan (why?) and later Jessica kills him while imagining she sees ghosts.

I’ve seen director John Hancock introducing his baseball movie Bang The Drum Slowly, seems like a nice enough guy. J. Mayer calls it “one of the most powerful treatments of the dream of getting away from it all, and the horrors that ensue when we seek refuge in places we little understand and where, in the end, we may not really belong.”

by ·Comments Off on Zero Dark Thirty (2012, Kathryn Bigelow)

After the Nairobi mall attack, I felt like watching some terrorists get killed. Jessica Chastain (Tree of Life, Take Shelter) gets help from her torturer friend Jason Clarke (killer of Gatsby), follows the trail left by informants to identify Bin Laden’s personal messenger, sees her friend Jennifer Ehle (Contagion) get blown up following a false lead, traces the messenger’s cellphone, follows him to a compound, spends years convincing her dumb bosses (first Katy’s TV football coach Kyle Chandler, then Mark Strong of Tinker Tailor) to invade it, then sends a Seal team (featuring Brolin-looking Gatsby star Joel Edgerton and Chris Pratt of Parks & Rec). They crash one helicopter but still have two others, shoot Bin Laden in the face, and take off.

by ·Comments Off on Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989, Aki Kaurismaki)

“Do you know Mexico?”
“… Sure.”
“Go there.”

Ridiculous comedy about soviet musicians who head to America to find their fortune. The movie’s deadpan consistency won me over. By the time the “deceased” band member they’ve been carrying frozen atop their car thaws out and joins them mid-song (a development I saw coming an hour earlier but still enjoyed watching), I was happy that there are sequels to look forward to.

Bunch of guys who look like TV’s Frank and wear pointy clown shoes to match their haircuts go on a road trip through America (from NYC to Mexico), playing small clubs along the way. They’re all pretty indistinguishable except for their tyrannical manager, the long-lost cousin they pick up somewhere in Texas, and the idiot Igor who followed them from home attempting to help. A.K. lets the songs play out, making it a sort of concert film.

Kaurismaki was in synch with Jarmusch, shooting in all the same locations as his earlier Down By Law the same year Jim was filming the similarly rockabilly-referencing Mystery Train. He appears as a car dealer in this one. The Idiot is Kari Väänänen (Polonius in Hamlet Goes Business) – he and band manager Matti Pellonpää have been in a bunch of Kaurismaki’s movies.

Igor at a Memphis barber shop:

Thru the Wire (1987)

Criterion/Hulu also had some of A.K.’s short films. This is a noirish clip – Nicky Tesco (cousin/vocalist from the feature) escapes from prison, seeks his woman while being chased by cops.

Rocky VI (1986)

Giant Russian Igor completely destroys wispy American Rocky (and some officials) in the ring. The music track is dark, with layered vocal samples – and yodeling, at one point.