by ·Comments Off on I’m No Angel (1933, Wesley Ruggles)

Katy’s response to this: Mae West is so weird. It’s true – takes some time to get used to her personality at the start of the movie, as she slowly struts and moans, throwing out quips in a Popeye mutter as everyone who sees her becomes instantly entranced. Then the story gets weird too. Circus star Tira has been dating a rich guy (prolific small-timer Kent Taylor, who’d end up in MST3K-bait in the 1960’s) under the nose of his jealous fiancee Alicia, then dates the rich guy’s rich friend (Cary Grant) instead. Tira ends up suing Grant when he breaks off their engagement due to interference from her pickpocket ex-buddy Slick, acts as her own attorney, winning both the case and Grant. Feels more like she has successfully defended her own promiscuity, coming off as the most sexually liberated woman in movies for thirty years in either direction. The authorities agreed, establishing the production code to shut her up.

I wonder if 12-year-old Jack Clayton (director of The Innocents and Something Wicked This Way Comes) saw Cary Grant’s “Jack Clayton” getting the girl and thought he oughtta get into the picture business.

by ·Comments Off on The Lower Depths (1959, Akira Kurosawa)

I bought Criterion’s Lower Depths double-feature, watched the Renoir version then only took seven years to watch the Kurosawa version. This one by comparison lacks snails, a fancy baron’s house, and a finale where the happy couple walks off into the sunset.

Toshiro Mifune is the big named star, but this is completely an ensemble drama – he’s less the lead than Jean Gabin was in the Renoir. It seems like a play, mostly confined to the interior of a single room, ending in the courtyard just outside. Shot mostly in long takes which, thinking back on vague recollections of Ran, Dreams and Ikiru, might be a Kurosawa trademark.

Mifune lives with a bunch of others in a shitty tenement – there’s the tinker with his deathly ill wife, a gambler, a drunken actor (Kamatari Fujiwara of The Hidden Fortress and Mickey One), an ex-samurai, a candy-seller, and prostitute Akemi Negishi (the only woman on Anatahan). Mifune used to be hot for the landlady (Isuzu Yamada, Lady Macbeth of the same year’s Throne of Blood) but lately has taken up with her younger sister Okayo (Kyoko Kagawa of Mothra, lead guy’s miserable suicide sister in Sansho the Bailiff), incurring the older sister’s wrath. Landlord Ganjiro Nakamura (star of Ozu’s Floating Weeds and The End of Summer) hangs out with the gambler, tries to stay out of the romantic drama but gets killed for his trouble.

Also in the mix: randomly-appearing high-energy Unokichi, and a traveling magical grandpa who shows up to dispense wisdom then vanishes during the murder.

by ·Comments Off on The Oath (2010, Laura Poitras)

With Poitras in the news so much, I’m getting around to watching her follow-up to My Country, My Country – supposed to be the second in a trilogy, but now that she’s embroiled in spy drama, I wonder if plans have changed for the third film. I kinda understood and kinda liked My Country, but The Oath is all-around incredible.

Two brothers-in-law worked for Osama bin Laden shortly before 2001, and now Osama’s bodyguard and Al Qaeda trainer Abu Jandal is free in Yemen, driving a cab, and Osama’s driver Salim Hamdan, who was much lower in the chain than Jandal, having never taken “the oath” or being trusted with insider info, has been in Guantanamo for most of a decade.

The movie follows Jandal, who holds jihadist meetings at home and discusses his history, and Hamdan’s lawyer, who’s refreshingly outspoken about his own military bosses’ injustices. Hamdan was “the first man with a personal connection to bin Laden captured after 9/11”, and his victorious 2006 case led to a new law being passed which was then used against him retroactively. His lawyer argued that you just can’t do that. They did anyway. Jandal was in prison during the 9/11 attacks and knew nothing of them. When he was told the details, he turned on his former comrades (he’d personally known all 19 hijackers) and told the FBI everything he knew about Al Qaeda’s operations. Unbelievably, Hamdan is released from Guantanamo and returns to his family in early 2009, but refused interview requests. Jandal: “He has become very quiet and introverted because he spent most of his time in solitary confinement. I no longer own a taxi. I had to sell my car because I was in so much debt. I am now in desperate need of income.”

by ·Comments Off on Of Gods and Men (2010, Xavier Beauvois)

French monks in Algeria, led by Lambert Wilson (Not on the Lips) but also featuring the great Michael Lonsdale and Philippe Laudenbach (Mon Oncle d’Amerique) with his big comedy eyes, hear that a civil war is brewing, have to decide whether to stay or leave. They provide a primary source of medical care for the locals and don’t want to abandon them, but it seems their lives may be in danger, despite a cautious truce with the Muslim militants. Faith is tested, fates are decided, and monks are kidnapped and murdered. Kind of a depressing movie, actually.

Ouch from D. Nowell-Smith in Film Quarterly: “Beauvois has managed to make a film about postcolonial Algeria in which it is French expatriates who are the victims; the 100,000-plus casualties of the civil war are, for the film’s purposes, incidental to the monks’ own suffering.” He also compares to White Material, a film from the same year about French nationals living in an ex-colony during civil war. “Of Gods and Men becomes a surprisingly feel-good film, at least for its audience of citizens of a European power whose invidious colonial past is thus suppressed under a cosy, but ultimately false, humanitarian warmth.”

by ·Comments Off on Gershwin (1992, Alain Resnais)

Since I’ve watched nearly all of Alain Resnais’s movies, and loved nearly all the ones I’ve watched, I had the completist urge to watch his hour-long entry in a series of TV episodes about creative types: Kafka, Vivaldi, Einstein among others in an optimistically-titled, short-lived series called The Audio-Visual Encyclopedia. Didn’t expect much, but it’s pretty remarkable.

Bertrand Tavernier digs through the archives:

Opens with a player piano, seen but not heard, then people talking about Gershwin in different languages, unsubbed. The film’s writer Edward Jablonski is on screen talking about Gershwin when a narrator starts talking over him. Photos fade in and out, people vanish like in Not on the Lips. Resnais makes much of Gershwin’s erratic behavior shortly before dying of a brain tumor, uses this to justify interruptions and strangeness in the movie. And Resnais’s recent interest in graphics – see (or preferably don’t see) his comic-book movie I Want To Go Home – comes alive with illustrations.

One speaker is put on hold in a corner of the frame while the movie lets another person talk:

by ·Comments Off on ¡Cuba Sí­! (1961, Chris Marker)

As soon as Castro took over after the communist revolution, Marker went to document the experience, producing a jubilant propaganda film in the style of his recent travel essay films. Not sure if he met and interviewed Castro directly, or is using stock footage – my trusty Catherine Lupton book would tell me, if I had it here.

“Castro has betrayed the revolution,” said the U.S. State Dept. And we know how the State Dept. jealously protects the purity of the revolution. We hesitate to believe this is the main concern of the USA’s avatars of democracy in Cuba. There must be something else.

The same week, I read Susan Howe’s book Sorting Facts, or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Chris Marker, an unusually well-informed (mentions of Tarkovsky and Cuba) poetic examination of Marker’s works.

by ·Comments Off on 5th Ave Girl (1939, Gregory La Cava)

One of those Great Depression movies where a poor girl is inexplicably taken in by a millionaire family (see also: Easy Living). Mopey millionaire Walter Connolly (Twentieth Century) has home problems. His wife (Verree Teasdale, queen of the amazons in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) goes out with her playboy friends and forgets his birthday. His son (future Western star, played one of Wyatt Earp’s brothers in My Darling Clementine) plays around, neglecting his role in the family business. And his daughter is hot for communist chauffeur Mike (not the first classic movie we’ve seen featuring plot points stolen by Downton Abbey).

Out for a walk, Walter runs into down-on-her-luck Ginger Rogers and invites her to celebrate his birthday. After he invites her to stay at the house, he realizes her presence has an electrifying effect on the family, who think he has blatantly taken a mistress. Ginger is glad to not have money problems for a little while, but the family drama gets to her and she finally runs off until rescued by son Tim Holt.

Maybe the best Ginger movie we’ve seen yet. Features the great Franklin Pangborn in a small role. Katy also recognized Jack Carson as a ukelele-playing sailor. We’ve lately seen him as Cagney’s frenemy in The Strawberry Blonde and Myrna Loy’s hot neighbor in Love Crazy.

by ·Comments Off on Soul Kitchen (2009, Fatih Akin)

More slight than I would’ve thought possible from Akin after seeing his The Edge of Heaven. Injured chef Zinos runs a simple restaurant for locals, hires his fuckup paroled brother (Moritz Bleibtreu, Lola’s boyfriend in Run Lola Run) and a fancypants chef from the city (Birol Unel, star of Head-On), has a troubled long-distance relationship with his girl. Can they save the restaurant from the idiot brother, a scheming realty developer, health inspectors, their customers and themselves? Kind of. Loosely inspired by the life of lead actor Adam Bousdoukos, who ran a restaurant during the making of Head-On.

by ·Comments Off on The World’s End (2013, Edgar Wright)

Peter (Eddie Marsan), Oliver (Martin Freeman), Steven (Paddy Considine), and Andy (Nick Frost) reluctantly join Gary King (Simon Pegg) in reliving his youth and ignoring adult realities. Then they fight aliens. It’s all kind of amazing.

Jan. 2015:
Watched again. Katy didn’t like it much.