by ·Comments Off on Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019, Matt Wolf)

“She was extremely fearful that america would replicate nazi Germany,” so these things come in cycles. Marion started recording the news during the late ’79 Iran hostage crisis, didn’t stop until her death in 2012, and this doc was made years later so we get interviews (with her two families and the nurse and chauffeur) and re-enactments. Most of the tape footage shown is news highlights of major events, not necessarily something you’d need a comprehensive archive for, but a couple of obscure gems are thrown in. Centerpiece of the doc is a split-screen of four networks in real-time watching the WTC disaster. Marion produced a talk TV show in Philly – her favorite topic was the open exchange of ideas, though at home she was extremely controlling. Guess it’s hard to fit the life of a complicated person and 30+ years of news coverage into ninety minutes, but I look forward to the projects that’ll come out using the digital archive of her tapes.

Choice footage of this guy getting scolded for being racist:

by ·Comments Off on Varda by Agnès (2019, Agnès Varda)

A final film that works just as well as an introduction.

On one hand, it’s mainly a career summary, and I didn’t need one. But I guess I did, because Jane B. looks different than I imagined it, and it’s really time to rewatch Le Bonheur, and it even made me think that One Sings needs another look, and time with Agnès is always well-spent.

by ·Comments Off on Porto of My Childhood (2001, Manoel de Oliveira)

“It is really inelegant for a man to let himself grow old.” A late film to be sure, an old man looking back at his debut from 70 years ago, remembering his young life. How was anyone supposed to know that Oliveira, in his 90s, would make ten more features after this?

Sometimes it’s a fun story of artistic discovery, but there’s a rueful thread of disappointment since all these good times took place with his friends, all artists, exiled and dead. Some old film clips and photographs, as expected. The movie centers around a series of real-time scenes: an opening overture with the camera behind the conductor… a drive through the streets at night… a poem… a song.

by ·Comments Off on In the Mood for Love (2000, Wong Kar-Wai)

Rewatched with Katy on Criterion Channel. I guess we’d last seen it before I started the blog, and there’s a particular reason we had to rewatch it now, but since I’m not going to elucidate, and since I didn’t get any screenshots from streaming, I’ll just link to Eric Hynes’s great writeup.

by ·Comments Off on Gumshoe (1971, Stephen Frears)

Albert Finney is a would-be comedian and general smartass, places an ad in the paper announcing himself as a private eye and immediately gets in over his head. It’s a good premise, because at no point is Finney an actual detective – when he finds a gun at a crime scene, he keeps playing with it and shows it off to everyone he sees.

Albert:

Finney’s brother William (Frank Finlay, one of Lester’s Musketeers) is the type of serious businessman who also knows how to dispose of a dead body, and the brother’s girl who used to be Finney’s girl is his Charlie Bubbles costar Billie Whitelaw. Clues lead to an occult bookstore lead to a heroin trade. There’s a hot library girl, some racism, and some unusually good dialogue.

Billie:

by ·Comments Off on Invention for Destruction (1958, Karel Zeman)

Jiri Menzel had just died, but instead of one of his movies on a Monday night I chose his countryman. I’ve seen some career-bookend works by Zeman, his early Prokouk shorts and late feature The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but not the heyday works, and this was spectacular. Real people against illustrated backgrounds, the Sin City of its time. Every kind of animation and visual trick seamlessly integrated, the thin striped pattern from the book illustrations appearing everywhere, overall amazing visual design… and to think his Baron Munchausen is supposed to be even better and I’ve been meaning to rent it for twenty years.

Our Narrator is assisting a scientist when the two are kidnapped (along with a pretty lady, of course) by pirates and taken to an evil mastermind inside a volcano who gets the scientist to help him unlock the secrets of the atom and conquer the world. The narrator is alarmed by all this but the scientist is happily distracted with a new lab and new problems to solve, until the very end, when he realizes what he’s doing and nukes the volcano. In the meantime we get submarines, a fighting octopus, parrots and fishes, of course a balloon or two, and a fantasy tour through all the inventions of the era, real and imagined (camels on rollerskates!), an alternate vision of what Tesla could’ve been.

by ·Comments Off on My Brilliant Career (1979, Gillian Armstrong)

Oops, we discussed this one but I never wrote anything down about it. Australian period lit adaptation with some lively bits. I completely cannot recognize the Judy Davis of Barton Fink and Naked Lunch (which I just rewatched) in this Judy Davis… both Judys are very good, they just might as well be different people. We very much recognized Sam Neill as her suitor in the latter half, but it’s the odd movie about a woman who chooses to stay unmarried so she can have a career. Along the way we get one of the most well-staged pillow fights since Zero for Conduct.

by ·Comments Off on The Hidden (1987, Jack Sholder)

Michael Nouri (of Flashdance and the original Captain America) is hotshot supercop Beck, and after an ordinary citizen goes on an outrageous crime spree, Beck is joined by serious FBI-guy Kyle MacLachlan (the year after Blue Velvet) who’s on the trail of a body-swapping alien that likes fast cars, hot girls, loud music, and doing murders. The alien’s motivations seem more human-joyride than world-endangering, so its interest in a senator is aiming for high-stakes Dead Zone/Omen III drama but I dunno. Either way, FBI Kyle turns out to be possessed by an alien hunting the rogue alien, and when he check “himself” out in a mirror it’s extremely Twin Peaks.

The first alien host is Hank Jennings, Norma’s husband in Twin Peaks, and the second host (William Boyett’s final film was Theodore Rex which has a surprisingly stacked cast) has a heart condition, to the annoyance of the alien who can’t run fast enough to carjack a convertible, so has to go to the dealer and steal one like an ordinary lunk. Then comes a stripper (Claudia Christian of Babylon 5 and Maniac Cop 2), then a dog… a cop who kills Danny Trejo… and the senator. Our heroes prevail, but Beck is fatally shot so Kyle Luzes into him. It is an 80s thriller, so there’s also a shootout in a mannequin factory, a ray gun, and a flamethrower.

The writer later hit it big with Operation Dumbo Drop, then the National Treasure movies. Director Sholder, the DP and a couple producers had just made Nightmare on Elm Street 2, and apparently they expected to make part 3 since “the third elm street venture” is their copyright company. The 1993 Hidden sequel was directed by nobody, starred nobody, recast Beck and his wife, and had a lead character named MacLachlan.

by ·Comments Off on Salome’s Last Dance (1988, Ken Russell)

Right after watching Henry V, here’s another play adapted into a movie in which the play is performed before an audience. In this case, the audience is Wilde himself, whose new Salome play has been banned so his favorite brothel treats him to a surprise performance of it. So the makeup and costumes and performances are all over the top, and every actor in this is worth at least ten of the Henry V actors. “What our production lacks in stagecraft we hope to make up in enthusiasm.”

Salome introduces herself to Wilde:

Ken Russell is what happens when a master of cinema technique is also a very silly goose. The great Glenda Jackson (Women in Love) played the queen, Stratford Johns (Lair of the White Worm) the king, Nickolas Grace (jerky guest in Sleepwalker) as Wilde, and John the Baptist was the proprietor of Black Museum. The lead actress, so good in this, never appeared in another film due to illness, but according to a Guardian article her health improved.