by ·Comments Off on Throne of Blood (1957, Akira Kurosawa)

A few days after Rashomon, we took a whole class to the Alamo for this one, all of our first times seeing it. A version of Macbeth that is plenty enjoyable on its own, through its great atmosphere and unique variations on the story, and even more so after reading about some of the design elements and historical context.

From Stephen Prince’s Criterion essay:

Noh shows up everywhere in Throne of Blood, making the project a real fusion of cinema and theater… Noh elements include the music (that assertive flute, for example), the bare sets, and especially the stylized performances by Mifune and Isuzu Yamada … Actors in Noh use masks, and while Kurosawa doesn’t do anything so blatantly artificial here, he does have Mifune and Yamada model facial expressions that resemble popular Noh masks (a strategy he extended in Yamada’s makeup) … Kurosawa strips all the psychology out of Macbeth and gives us a film whose characters are Noh types and where emotions — the province of character in the drama of the West — are formally embodied in landscape and weather. The bleached skies, the fog, the barren plains, and characters going adrift against and within these spaces — this is where the emotion of the film resides … Kurosawa wants us to grasp the lesson, to see the folly of human behavior, rather than to identify or empathize with the characters.

Toshiro Mifune’s ninth Kurosawa film, with Isuzu Yamada (landlady of The Lower Depths) as his Lady, and Minoru Chiaki (the priest in Rashomon, also Hidden Fortress and The Face of Another) as his friend-turned-rival. The three witches are replaced by a single spinning-wheel ghost, with a neat single take when the spirit house vanishes while the warriors (and camera) are distracted.

by ·Comments Off on Rashômon (1950, Akira Kurosawa)

I love the performances even more than the multiple-perspective conceit, how Mifune goes from devil-may-care trickster thief to pathetic coward, the wife from tormented crying victim to cold duel instigator. Three points of view including the dead husband’s through a medium, then a fourth version from a witness woodcutter, then he’s also revealed to be a liar/thief, having stolen a valuable dagger from the crime scene, and all this causes the local priest to despair until his faith is restored by the woodcutter adopting a baby that was apparently abandoned at the temple while they were telling crime stories. The priest’s bit is overdone, rest of the movie is perfect. Watched on the big screen at Alamo with my Katy.

Won top prize at Venice against Diary of a Country Priest, Renoir’s The River, Ace in the Hole, Born Yesterday, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, and won different oscars in two consecutive years, since their rules used to be even stupider than they are now. This was Toshiro Mifune’s fifth Kurosawa film, and his breakout role to the Western world. The wife Machiko Kyô starred in Gate of Hell, the dead husband Masayuki Mori in Ugetsu, and the medium Noriko Honma in each of Kurosawa’s final three films.

by ·Comments Off on Mission: Impossible 6: Fallout (2018, Christopher McQuarrie)

This was fun. Bad guy Sean Harris is back from part five, Henry Cavill is a traitorous team member, Rebecca Ferguson is a badass, Vanessa Kirby (TV’s The Crown) an arms dealer, Angela Bassett the new boss when Alec Baldwin gets killed. Ends with some more impressive-looking helicopter stunts than in part one, a clifftop battle, and nuclear weapons set to destroy a significant chunk of the world’s population beginning with Ethan’s wife Michelle Monaghan.

by ·Comments Off on Crazy Rich Asians (2018, Jon M. Chu)

Normal college student Rachel (Constance Wu of TV’s Fresh Off the Boat) is invited to a friend’s wedding by her wonderful, loving boyfriend Nick (Henry Golding of that Anna Kendrick movie this year that looked pretty good), who turns out to be mega-rich, so Nick’s family looks down on her, and Rachel has to spend the trip placating rich people and deciding whether it’s worth it. Rachel happens to have a friend in Singapore, our comic relief Awkwafina (Ocean’s Eight). The wedding is between Chris Pang (Crouching Tiger 2) and Sonoya Mizuno (Kyoko in Ex Machina). Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger 1) plays Nick’s mom whom Rachel has to convince of her worthiness, and Jing Lusi (of Milla Jovovich actioner Survivor) is Nick’s ex who wants to torpedo Rachel.

Based on a hit novel, Jon Chu previously made three Justin Bieber movies and Jem and the Holograms. Singapore looks just wonderful – we should visit and spend all our money there.

by ·Comments Off on Daughters of Darkness (1971, Harry Kumel)

A sexy 1970’s Euro-vampire movie. Newlyweds Valerie (Danielle Ouimet, of a few Canadian sex movies and devil movies) and Stefan (John Karlen, kind of a brutish, squished Mark Hamill type, of Dark Shadows) arrive at a hotel where a countess (Delphine Seyrig, between Donkey Skin and Discreet Charm) and her companion Ilona (Andrea Rau, of German sex comedies) are also staying. The newlyweds hear there have been murders in Bruges, so they take a day trip there and back, then a cop arrives at the hotel (final role of Belgian 1930’s and 40’s actor Georges Jamin), and at this point I’m pretty sure everyone in the movie is a vampire – they all wear scarves and act suspiciously.

“You’re being foolish… I won’t let you leave until you explain” – different characters say the same lines, and it’s either a deep commentary on identity, or lazy writing. The camera lingers on bodies and gets draped in colored filters (Kumel also made an Orson Welles occult mystery the same year). Stefan tries to get playful (while nude) with Ilona, but I didn’t realize vampires hate showers, and she falls onto a razor. Delphine takes Valerie as her new travel companion, but they immediately go for a drive into the dawning sun and get burnt up. The whole thing’s got some fashion and visual style at least, and it’s agreeably colorful and odd.

Ilona:

Delphine and Valerie:

by ·Comments Off on Cure (1997, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Opens with a psychokinetic woman reading Bluebeard, then a guy kills someone with a pipe to happy upbeat music. I haven’t seen this since it came out, and didn’t remember most of it, except that the whole movie takes place in shabby, leaky buildings.

Takabe (the great Kôji Yakusho – he’ll always be “Ship Captain in Pulse” to me) investigates the pipe murder and finds the killer immediately. Then a guy kills his wife, a cop shoots his partner, each admits their crime and says it felt like the right thing to do at the time, and they’d all been in contact with a wandering amnesiac (Masato Hagiwara: Café Lumière, Chaos), a psychology dropout who got deep into hypnotism and occult psychotherapy. “All the things that used to be inside me… now they’re all outside.”

Peter Labuza on letterboxd:

While the film is told in long takes, these takes are given a mundane design. The initial scene at the beach is one of the most frightening moments in the film without anything in the frame to suggest that this moment is frightening. Characters are relaxedly placed in the frame, not tightly ordered, and the way that the antagonist controls his doomed subjects is through commonplace lighters and glasses of water. Kurosawa emphasizes their importance the first time in the frame, but then allows them to stand as far back in the frame as possible otherwise, letting our own paranoid spectatorship create the fear than letting the camera do it. Cure‘s mise-en-scene does everything possible to tell you “this is not a horror movie,” in the same way that the hypnotized have no understanding of the atrocities they are forced to commit.

by ·Comments Off on 11 x 14 (1977, James Benning)

A selection of screenshots, with some notes I took, not necessarily going together…

Rough edits, film flares out at the end of each shot.

Mostly motor vehicle themed except for some especially long takes: a train ride, washing dishes, nude cuddling to an endless Dylan song.

The camera moved!

Not the best audio in the world, wind and transit sounds.

One editing trick at the hour mark to make sure you’re still paying attention.

Smokestack song is same as cuddling song, Black Diamond Bay by Dylan.

Staged-looking scenes and some natural street life.
(note photo in the above shot)

Good weekend afternoon movie.

The filmmuseum DVD comes with a great director interview:

What I am talking about is a general feeling that I believe people get when they watch a film. This feeling may be shared among members of the audience, and it may vary from one individual to another. What I am trying to do is to design films that are seductive, that leave gaps in the narrative that people will be able to fill with their own lives. I want the audience to help piece the shots together. I want them to have to work a little when they watch a film, to make watching a film more of an active experience. I think that when this happens, when people help tie a film together with their own personal experiences, the images in the film become what I am calling a metaphor. It is a pattern of meaning rather than a direct translation. You don’t say, well, this is what happened in the film, but rather this is how I relate the images, the events that occur on the screen. This kind of general pattern of meaning that you come away with is not really in the film, nor in the events that are photographed. There is no objective reality; there is only this metaphor.

by ·Comments Off on BlacKkKlansman (2018, Spike Lee)

John “son of Denzel” Washington is Ron, a rookie cop who gets himself invited to a Klan meeting by being friendly with David Duke (Topher Grace) over the phone, and has to send his white (ahem, Jewish) coworker Adam Driver to the in-person meetings while working behind the scenes to bust these guys, which they kinda manage to do when a Klan wife accidentally bombs her husband while trying to murder Ron’s girlfriend. Spike has righteous cop protagonists but doesn’t entirely let the police department off the hook. His main point is made clear by the Charlottesville news footage closing the film, and even if he changes no modern minds, the movie is fun and inspired a good article about “the cruel sucking nullity of whiteness” in the dying days of the Village Voice.

by ·Comments Off on The Lunchbox (2013, Ritesh Batra)

Two people with dissatisfying home lives meet via lunchbox misdelivery. The delivery service won’t correct the error because they insist their system is flawless, so the two communicate via lunch notes, while he (Irrfan Khan of The Namesake) deals with an overeager and underskilled accounting subordinate, and she (Nimrat Kaur of sci-fi series Wayward Pines) deals with an extremely inattentive husband. Heads in the obvious direction, but Khan is more crotchety than expected and the movie overall more finely made. The story didn’t linger in my mind after watching, but every minute of the movie was enjoyable, so it’s an Indian food-romance John Wick. Batra’s follow-ups were the Broadbent/Rampling Sense of an Ending (also about a grumpy old man) and the Redford/Fonda Our Souls at Night (also about lonely strangers making a connection).