by ·Comments Off on Hanzo The Razor: Sword of Justice (1972, Kenji Misumi)

Apparently the dirty, ugly unpleasantness of American 70’s cinema made it to Japan. This is basically Shaft as a samurai flick, more icky and less funny than Black Dynamite.

Why did I watch this? One summer at the beach I read an article by Jonathan Rosenbaum about Japanese filmmaker Yasuzo Masumura. I was impressed that so many essential films were made by someone I’d never heard of, so I sought them out when I got home – enjoyed his Afraid to Die and Blind Beast but I didn’t try very hard to find more, got distracted by other things, until I saw his name on this box set of filthy samurai cop films. Years later I am finally watching the first in the trilogy, which is not by Masumura but Kenji Misumi, director of some Zatoichi and Lone Wolf & Cub movies. So this is a bad movie watched in preparation for a bad sequel by a recommended director. Auteurism at work.

Hanzo is played by Zatoichi himself, Shintarô Katsu, also of The Loyal 47 Ronin. The 40-year-old actor’s speed and agility are unimpressive, but he can put on spiked metal knuckles and punch a dude’s eyes out. Hanzo’s main weapon is his cock (“You’re so virile,” exclaims a witness he is raping). Hanzo is so good that the girls give up information not when he threatens to rape them, but when he threatens to STOP raping them. And yes, it’s “them,” because the movie ran out of ideas so it used that one two or three times.

The uncorruptible Hanzo takes on his corrupt boss (Kô Nishimura), the escaped Killer Kanbei, and some sad little girl’s dad who is dying from stomach cancer. In the end, having wreaked some major vengeance upon the criminal justice system and raped every woman in sight (because females don’t deserve justice), he hangs the dad, then his theme song plays and it’s over.

I liked some of the stylish transitions and split-screen and backdrops anyway. IMDB isn’t being cooperative with character names, so I’m not sure exactly who fought whom or who got raped when, but I’m sure all lingering questions will be answered in the sequel.

by ·Comments Off on Finis Terrae (1929, Jean Epstein)

When I realized there is a movie called Finis Terrae from 1929 and another called Finisterrae from eighty years later, I set out to watch them both. Sometimes it’s as simple as that. The latin phrase means “ends of the earth.” There’s a place in Spain (where the 2010 film is set) called Finisterra, and a university in Chile called Finis Terrae (how wonderful), but this Epstein film was set on Ouessant, a small island off the coast of France (today home to an airline called Finistair), and on the even smaller island of Bannec. As the opening titles tell us, “on an island where winter storms wipe out all forms of life, four men come in two teams to spend the summer collecting seaweed in total isolation…”

A gorgeous film, made on location with nearly as many credited cinematographers (one of whom would later work on Vampyr and Hotel du Nord) as actors. Very simple story, a bit too poetically-paced at times, but it worked – I found it very affecting by the end. Apparently not much is known about the film on the web. I’ve seen it listed as a documentary – it’s clearly not, though Epstein seems to have cast local workers instead of film actors.

Strange that the team leaders look to be about sixteen, and their barely-named assistants are large middle-aged men with mustaches – why not the other way around? Ambroise, one of the two young men cuts himself on a broken bottle of liquor belonging to the other, Jean-Marie, causing both a grudge between the men and an infected sore on Ambroise’s finger that gets worse over the next few days, preventing him from working and finally threatening his life … “during a becalmed period making it impossible to cross the waters without the requisite wind in the sails. Cue a rescue mission launched from the mother island, Ouessant, to get them back to at least a semblance of civilisation.” (A. Fish)

D. Cairns:

When the sick boy starts to hallucinate, the movie almost oversteps its stylistic bounds by trying to evoke a state the audience is already in: Epstein snap-cuts a jangling montage of looming ECUs and what look like off-cuts and deleted scenes into an abstract nightmare that threatens to turn the whole experience into abstraction and dissonance, with no way out save the declaration of a cinematic Year Zero from which we can start afresh. Seriously, the movie feels like it was made tomorrow, or at any rate made in 1929 by time-travelers.

A. Fish again:

It would be Epstein’s parting glory; oh, other films would follow in its wake, but they weren’t worthy of him and he’d disappear, a fossil, a megalith one might say, of a silent era, not yet put out to pasture but with the fires not so much raging as flickering in the hearth. He wasn’t alone, one could add Gance, l’Herbier and de Gastyne to that list of exiles, yet his is a name that should stand tall in French film history, but instead often merits at best a paragraph in conventional histories.

by ·Comments Off on Finisterrae (2010, Sergio Caballero)

Saw some screen shots from this movie and decided I must watch it immediately. Then I found out there are seemingly unrelated films named Finisterrae and Finis Terrae (“ends of the earth” in Latin) and decided I must watch them both. And they were both pretty spectacular, but I can’t pretend that I found any similarities beyond the titles.

Forest of ears:

Two ghosts (played by men wearing sheets) go on a journey. I did not like the high pitched noise produced by the forest of ears, but I liked every other single thing. There are Garrel references, spoken credits, very nice music by Jimi Tenor (also “Ghost Rider” by Suicide), a hippie joke, and it’s all super-quirky in a high-art-film sort of way. Seems like the kind of thing that’s made just for viewers like me, but could fall right on its face if not done perfectly, like that sad attempt at a cult movie, Buckaroo Banzai. But I fell for this one completely, and I’m not the only one; Rotterdam gave it an award a couple days after I watched it.

Cataluña:

Hippie:

The ghosts are Russian, and I think they’re in Cataluña – not sure where Chile and Germany fit in. One rides a horse (later, a wheelchair) and they meet other animal friends: deer, an owl and various stuffed creatures in a museum exhibit where they spend the night. Sometimes their horse turns into a mechanical puppet, and sometimes he is on fire.

It might all make sense in some way, be a huge metaphor for some Spanish thing or other, but I didn’t get any of that. I focused on the surreal fun of it all, the and the beautifully composed images by Caballero and d.p. Edward Grau (also of A Single Man, who at age 30 has made more indelible images than I ever will).

After the ghost thing fizzles out, there is a frog princess story, then a moose or reindeer walking through a fancy house, and back to the museum animals. I would watch this again right now if I supposed that anyone I know would sit through it.

by ·Comments Off on For Your Consideration (2006, Christopher Guest)

A Jewish family drama called Home For Purim gets oscar buzz for three of its four lead performances. The distributor wants a hit so they tone down the Jewishness and rename it Home For Thanksgiving. Finally the nominations come out and only the fourth, buzzless actor gets nominated, the others returning to their low-profile pre-fame existence.

Seems like this would be a good framework story for some jokes. But Guest didn’t think so… he thought those were the jokes. He reads the above paragraph and he’s already laughing, so why add more jokes? So there’s a jokeless parade of good actors in minor roles. To be fair, I laughed twice – at a sidetrack joke about bad breath and a bit of wordplay about Latin restaurants. Guest knows he’s good at gently skewering eccentric, mostly entertainment oriented subcultures, so after twenty-some years in the movie business (and with ringer cast member Ricky Gervais) I’d have hoped he could make a Hollywood satire with some bite, at least enough to rival Mamet’s State and Main.

Besides Ricky, I was glad to see Catherine O’Hara and Parker Posey as the rival stars, Harry Shearer as their good-natured co-lead, clueless rich producer Jennifer Coolidge, a lezzed-up Rachael Harris, regulars Michael McKean and Bob Balaban as the writers, 30 Rock‘s Scott Adsit in a small role on set, and especially Fred Willard and Jane Lynch (above) as co-hosts of an obnoxious TV morning show.

by ·Comments Off on A Canterbury Tale (1944, Powell & Pressburger)

The kind of movie that I appreciate more after watching it than during. Having read nothing about it beforehand, I spent much of the runtime wondering why P&P made a wartime movie about three strangers casually hanging out in a small country town near Canterbury, trying to solve the mystery of a man who throws glue in girls’ hair. Not that I minded, since it moves along at a fair pace and is lovely to look at, but as it was ending I finally realized it’s another kind of propaganda movie, better and more subtle than 49th Parallel, perhaps with a similar emotional development to The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (though it’s been a while since I’ve seen that one).

Of course, “more subtle than 49th Parallel” doesn’t mean it was a subtle movie, and I have a caveat about the pacing, too: John Sweet as Bob Johnson (not a film actor, but an actual U.S. army sergeant) delivers his lines with such cowboy cadence, I felt like I could’ve watched a whole other movie during the gaps between words.

On Bob’s way to Canterbury, a proper city with cathedrals and stuff, he gets waylaid in a small town, and a fellow traveler, here to relive a vacation she spent with her presumed-dead soldier fiancee, gets attacked by the glue man. To solve the mystery, the girl (Sheila Sim of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman) asks past glue victims in town for clues, Bob recruits the two warring armies of children (the film’s highlight, like a friendly Rome Open City) and their new British friend Peter (Dennis Price, who would return in Oh… Rosalinda!!) gets to know local historian Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman of 49th Parallel and One of Our Aircraft is Missing). Colpeper turns out to be the glue man – of course, being the first-billed actor and the main personality about town – but the ‘why’ is more interesting than the ‘who.’ He’s trying to scare local girls from dating visiting soldiers while their own men are off at war. Colpeper has an all-around weird way of seeing things, maybe just too British for my understanding, but he’s not a bad fellow.

L-R: Bob, Sheila and Dennis

In the end our pilgrims make it to Canterbury and each receives a blessing: Bob finds out that his girl hasn’t been responding to his letters because she moved to Sydney, not because she’s leaving him. Dennis, a theater organist before the war, gets to play the Canterbury Cathedral organ. And Sheila finds out her man is still alive. I don’t know how to do the movie justice with my little plot descriptions – it was all very moving. Also notable for being the film that killed Margaret Mitchell. On her way to see it, she got run down by a drunk at Peachtree and 13th, a few miles from here.

P. Von Bagh:

A Canterbury Tale is about clues, not as in a detective story (although the search for the mysterious “glue man” almost qualifies it as one), but clues leading to what is most essential or, perhaps, the real “why we fight” of life: culture, landscape, history, the senses. These things are woven into a slight double narrative, simultaneously very rich and very absurd …

Why do we fight? This wartime question was given an impeccable, contemporary answer by the Frank Capra team, in the United States, and by the documentarian-poet Humphrey Jennings, in England. The Archers, though, were stretching the boundaries, as if reaching for another reality. The film seems to be strictly about the everyday, while at the same time dealing with things almost never touched upon in cinema. The immaterial made concrete by the camera work of Erwin Hillier. A wholly fantastic mise-en-scène by Powell, intriguing because he does exactly the same and more with “realist” and “documentary” material as with studio magic, and with a unique activation of human senses, made sacred through the purest means of cinema. And all this based on the strangest of scenarios, developed by the greatest writer of cinema (at least since F. W. Murnau’s Carl Mayer): Emeric Pressburger.

Eric Portman’s Colpeper can be ranked with another great Powell and Pressburger character, Anton Walbrook’s harsh/gentle impresario Boris Lermontov, in The Red Shoes (1948). Colpeper might expound his philosophy in a ruthless way, but he is certain that he is acting for the cause of Culture (as Lermontov does for the cause of Art), without compromise. For characters with such a twisted perception of the world, their fight can only be strange.

Shots below are from the prologue, which cuts forward hundreds of years, from a pilgrim watching his hunting falcon to a modern soldier watching a spitfire fighter, a possible influence on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

by ·Comments Off on 8 X 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1957, Hans Richter)

“This film deals with the world of fantasy. It is a fairy-tale for grown-ups. It explores the realm behind the magic mirror wich served Lewis Carroll 100 years ago to stimulate your imagination. … This film has been produced by artists. We have made use of the traditional freedom of the artist to follow our inspiration.”

The producers felt compelled to append that little preface, probably to distinguish their movie from contemporary films like Desk Set, Bridge on the River Kwai and I Was a Teenage Werewolf. But this was also the year of artistic masterworks The Cranes Are Flying, Letter From Siberia and The Seventh Seal, none of which felt the need to open their piece with a pretentious prelude pointing out its poetry.

Cocteau, I think:

With the participation of Louis and Bebe Barron (Forbidden Planet), Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, dada artist Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, some of whom had previously worked on more justifiably renowned films like Entre’act, L’Age d’Or and Richter’s own Dreams That Money Can Buy.

Short, playful episodes, all somehow chess-related. For instance, in one scene a man is paralyzed and confounded by a chess board, mocked by a coat rack in the room shaped just like the king piece, while white mice run around his black shoes. A naked woman arrives and suddenly he is able to take his turn, while a horrible horn plays and the mice, captured by a folding chess board, transform into pigeons. This all sounds like it should make for a fine bit of visual poetry, except that the pacing makes it tedious, and most of the movie features intolerable flute, trumpet, accordion and violin music.

Richter was around 70 when he made this. Seems more like something he did with/for his buddies rather than general audiences. Titles and occasionally narration in English. I liked some stop-motion, a Svankmajeresque dance of rattles, mobiles and masks made from repurposed found objects. Liked the 1950’s fashions. Otherwise it’s a pleasant waste of time, maybe not the Great Lost Cocteau Film I was hoping for. I wouldn’t mind watching again if it ever surfaces with less appalling picture quality than my copy.

Allmovie:

The idea is to present chess conundrums cinematically the way Lewis Carroll did in literature, particularly in Through the Looking Glass. Filmmaker Hans Richter, who’d previously collaborated on Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet, designed his films like paintings; as a result 8 X 8 is visually dazzling, especially segment #2 (“A New Twist”) — even when the viewer is at a loss to understand what is going on.

Grunes:

The first episode is a period piece depicting royal intrigue in the woods. It includes a lady’s tripped-up, trapped bare foot: one of numerous erotic images. In another, Calder constructs a mobile and uses his breath to blow it into life. Here, also, is randomness—of the found objects, various movements resulting from disparate shapes and weights, etc. A woman’s kiss elsewhere turns a royal doll into a human beloved, but, unwilling to cede any power, the woman submits the man’s head and neck to a succession of hats (including a large one with a chessboard design) and ties, preferring to wear the crown herself, and converts the man into a puppet on a string. In perhaps the most wonderful episode, an adventure in “the fortunes of love,” Max Ernst pursues another chess piece, wife Dorothea Tanning, throughout Lower Manhattan—initially, in unexpected black and white. … A clock turns counterclockwise, erasing its numerical indicators. The film’s irresolution suggests that life is a chess game in endless play.

by ·Comments Off on The Illusionist (2010, Sylvain Chomet)

Only two people to mention here: Chomet, creator of Triplets of Belleville, and Jacques Tati, who wrote the partly autobiographical script. Having just watched a couple of Tati movies and gotten a feel for his comedy, this seemed about 10% Tati and 90% Chomet. Maybe that’s underselling it, since Chomet’s previous film was obviously Tati-influenced, with its dialogue-free physical comedy (not to mention the clip from Jour de Fete the triplets watch in bed).

There is a Tatiesque magician, tall guy, somewhat shabby, with an umbrella, a pretty good act and a fed-up rabbit. Rock and roll is in, and magic acts are out, so he finds himself unemployed. Invited to Scotland by a drunken fan, he meets a young girl named Alice, takes her to Edinburgh, but she has expensive tastes so he takes night jobs while trying to continue his magic career. Movie takes place around 1958-60, I think (Mon Oncle is in theaters), while the events on which it’s based would have been in the 40’s. In the end, the magician does not get the girl pregnant then abandon her. Instead she meets a nice boy closer to her own age and goes off with him, the illusionist quietly leaving town unmissed by his now-destitute vaudeville friends.

No spoken dialogue in any real language, just mumblings, like those animated shorts from weird countries that purposely include no dialogue so their movie can play festivals without need for subtitles or dubbing. Katy liked it alright but found it too sad, told me it’s at least better than Triplets, complimented the animation remarking on the characters’ physical presence, the heaviness of their steps.

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It’s hard for me to write about Jacques Tati movies, since mostly what I do is recount a movie’s story and actors I’ve seen before, and Tati films have almost no story and no actors I’ve seen before. Watched this one because I’d just seen M. Hulot’s Holiday when I found out The Illusionist would be playing theaters here, and thought I’d keep the Tati ball rolling.

Tati himself stars as a town postman inspired by an American newsreel and by his taunting neighbors to deliver the mail faster and more efficiently. So at least it has more of a story than M. Hulot’s Holiday (its story: “everyone is on vacation”) but really it’s the same type of movie as Holiday, gently introducing a bunch of characters and setting up unassuming comic situations which overlap in time and place, as Tati’s character guides us around town. This time I had even less sense than usual of who’s who in the cast, possibly because we watched the roughly-restored color version (first French film to be shot in color) on our TV, and in the wide shots (most of the film seems to be wide shots) faces looked blurry.

Funny that while he was breaking technological barriers, experimenting with color in this film and with scale in Playtime, he made such backward-looking movies. This may as well have been a silent film, and The Illusionist looks wistfully back from the late 50’s towards the heyday of vaudeville. Parade was his final anachronism, being one of the first-ever features shot on video and featuring mime performances in a circus tent. I can’t say I fell in love with Jour de fete, just found it to be a pleasant good time, but something about Tati’s movies and his career always keeps me fascinated, so I’m sure I’ll come back to watch it again.

by ·Comments Off on Make Way For Tomorrow (1937, Leo McCarey)

I finally watched the saddest movie of the entire 1930’s, now that it’s been recommended by every film critic everywhere and given a shiny new video release by Criterion, and I’m glad to discover that it has more in common with McCarey’s other movies (Ruggles of Red Gap, The Awful Truth) than with, for instance, Mizoguchi’s cinema of constant sorrow. Just because it’s a movie about a penniless elderly couple being separated and passed around by their middle-aged siblings who won’t make time in their lives for mom & dad doesn’t mean it can’t be fun to watch.

The couple walks in front of a projection screen:

As the Great Depression was wearing off, there were enough eager young unemployed workers around that nobody had to hire retirement-aged old men, so Barkley Cooper (Victor Moore, Fred Astaire’s buddy in Swing Time) finds himself unemployable and loses his house. His mortgage agent at the bank was a rival for the affections of Barkley’s wife Lucy (Beulah Bondi, Fred MacMurray’s mom in Remember the Night) fifty years ago, finally getting his sweet revenge. So the parents gather four of their five kids (the fifth has moved out west) and explain the situation.

L-R: George, Robert, Cora, Nellie:

Robert (Ray Mayer, played a character called Dopey in the Astaire/Rogers movie Follow the Fleet) somehow avoids taking any responsibility, and the husband of Nellie (Minna Gombell, widow of the murdered Thin Man) forbids her from inviting mom and dad into the house, “I married you, not your parents.” The others claim not to have enough room, so forbidding Cora (Elisabeth Risdon of High Sierra, The Roaring Twenties) takes the dad while weak-willed George (Thomas Mitchell, played Doc Boone in Stagecoach) takes his mother.

Louise Beavers as Mamie, one of many times she’d play a Mamie or Mammy, another being Holiday Inn:

Crazy thing about the 1930’s that familes can act like they are so underpaid, just barely getting by, but still employ a black housekeeper. Most of the rest of the movie follows the mother at George’s house, quickly getting on the nerves of his wife Anita (Fay Bainter, oscar-nominated for playing a homeless mother the following year in White Banners) and daughter Rhoda. Anita teaches classes in bridge at her house, and has as little compassion as the mother has a sense of when it’s inappropriate to start telling rambling stories, so it’s not going well. It’s going even worse for the dad, though, who spends his days with awesome shopkeeper Max (Maurice Moscovitch of Love Affair) because Cora is an intolerable bitch. Nobody cares what the parents want, so they never get to see each other anymore.

Max/Maurice:

Dad can’t find work and the kids can’t put up with this any longer. The new plan is to ship Dad off west with the fifth kid, claiming it’s for his health, and to put Mom in an old folks’ home, which she has visited and has told everyone it seems like a terrible place. The parents are wise to these plans, each figuring out that they’re being shuttled away because they have become inconvenient, but they put on a happy face for their last few hours together, walking the streets as a couple before the farewell dinner with the kids. Suddenly their fortunes turn, and everyone in the city is being nice to them. They enjoy a lovely dinner at the hotel where they’d spent their honeymoon, and then say goodbye at the train station, the kids belatedly discovering that they’d been abandoned. It’s all terrible the way the parents are being treated, but when Mom wonders what had gone wrong, she blames her own parenting. “You don’t sow wheat and reap ashes.” It’s all quite depressing, but skillfully written to also be entertaining without becoming a nonstop weepie.

Ellen Drew of Christmas In July in an early role as a theater usher, with George’s daughter Rhoda:

Outside the movie theater. Souls at Sea got three oscar nominations in ’38 and McCarey’s The Awful Truth got six, including a win for best director. No love for this film, however, which was McCarey’s own favorite.