by ·Comments Off on Hamlet (1948, Laurence Olivier)

Opens unpromisingly with text onscreen accompanying a narrator, but then we get a castle in the mist, the camera roaming to show off its fancy sets. I don’t think “this is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind” is from the original text.

Hamlet’s first monologue is in partial voiceover, a really good portrayal of someone tormentedly talking to themself. Elsewhere Ophelia narrates Hamlet’s wordless visit to her room, and he performs every word she’s saying in flashback-pantomime, a bit overkill. The zoom inside Hamlet’s head before “to be or not to be” was also odd. I would understand if other versions cut the scene where Hamlet gives long-winded direction to the actors before the play (and so they do). There are only two women in the movie and he throws both of them onto the floor. Hamlet gets kidnapped by pirates before the finale, did I dream this?

HAM-let:

Queen, King, Ophelia, Laertes:

Won best picture over The Red Shoes, a travesty, and Olivier got actor, but at least John Huston beat him for director. The king-uncle was in Went the Day Well and Disney’s Treasure Island, the queen in John Huston’s Freud movie, Horatio in The Projected Man, Polonius in The Mummy, and Laertes in that movie’s sequel/reboot The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb. Speaking of mummies, we get Peter Cushing as the silly-ass courier, also officiating the swordfight. Ophelia is Jean Simmons of Guys and Dolls, Estelle in Great Expectations, soon to be seen in The Big Country.

The actors:

The duel:

The Peter Cushing:

by ·Comments Off on Wicked City (1992, Peter Tai-Kit Mak)

Not good in almost any sense but absolutely a must-see for the bonkers imagination factor. Full of hilariously suggestive images, making a mockery of sex and religion. Tsui Hark cowrote/produced this anime remake, though it feels less written and more like it’s making up its rules as it goes along, with world-building ambition way beyond the league of the physical effects and baby computer graphics teams (there’s a cellophane blob and some mighty morphing). It’s impossible to dislike, or to imagine that we could do any better today.

The aliens invading Hong Kong in human disguises mostly take the form of hot chicks, and mostly they murder hot chicks… the movie is overall a big fan of hot chicks (this is apparently accurate to the original version).

Windy and Daishu:

Human cop Leon Lai likes lightsaber alien Windy (they play the killer and his agent in Fallen Angels) after they save each other’s lives. Half-alien cop Jacky Cheung (lately Bucktooth So in OUATIC 1) likes human traitor cop Orchid (Carman Lee Yeuk-Tung of Burning Paradise and Detective vs. Sleuths), but Sgt Yuen Woo-Ping keeps them apart. Alien boss Daishu is captured by the cops and kept magnetically captive (this is movie royalty Tatsuya Nakadai, star of Harakiri, apparently game for anything) while his evil son Roy Cheung (one of The Mission boys, also City on Fire) runs rampant in the city, plotting to hook the whole city on a drug that will simply kill them in a couple days. As the movie’s nonsense intensifies, the son ends up juiced to death by a jet engine, and the aliens’ vacuum powers reverse the flow of time and a psychokinetic police force lands a plane atop a skyscraper.

Sgt Yuen Woo-Ping orders all men in this movie to wear glasses:

and sometimes glasses get dirty:

by ·Comments Off on Hotel (2004, Jessica Hausner)

German Chloe Sevigny gets a job at a haunted hotel where everyone is unfriendly then she disappears into the woods like her predecessor did. Think this was Hausner’s second feature – I looked it up after watching her sixth. Our girl’s sinister coworker was Birgit Minichmayr, star of Everyone Else.

by ·Comments Off on TV/Q2/2024

All of this quarter’s television was watched on the exercise bike (:muscle:)
Still purportedly watching The Curse (not on bike) and I’ve started Lodge 49 s2 and Painting With John s3.

I’m a Virgo season 1 (2023)

Giant boy Jharrel Jerome (young André Holland in the middle section of Moonlight) is awkward because he has never socialized or even left the house, but after his first public appearance everyone is interested in him: an agent, a fashion company, a burger girl, a cult, a superhero, the teens. Burger girl becomes his girlfriend, has super speed powers. His friend with a car’s superpower is having a car. Their buddy Scat dies for a stupid reason, getting injured on his bike then turned away from the hospital for not having insurance, and this enflames the community, led by activist Jones. Meanwhile Cootie’s hero (“The Hero”) Walt Goggins is out busting protesters during evictions. Apparently lo-fi photography pulls out crazy technique when desired. Music by Tune-Yards. Showstopping didactic anti-capitalist rants and general anti-authoritarian vibe mix with The Hero’s identity crisis and random superhero stuff (Cootie’s parents have prepped a supervillain lair, some of the neighbors wake up fun-sized). Created by Boots Riley, who shared a list of further viewing/reading with Vulture:

One that is very inspiring is Matewan by John Sayles. There’s a book called Class Struggle Unionism by Joe Burns that just came out. A History of America in Ten Strikes by Erik Loomis. There’s a movie called Seeing Red, it’s a 1983 film by Jim Klein and Julia Reichert.

–
The Twilight Zone, Vol. 3 (1959)

106. Escape Clause

A basic deal-with-the-devil scenario, not even as interesting a concept as the pitchman from episode 2, but our lead idiot is good (David Wayne, the killer in Losey’s M). A hypochondriac who takes an offer from the devil (Thomas Gomez of Force of Evil, Key Largo) to be immortal, all he can think to do with his new vitality is throw himself in front of trains for kicks (and settlement money from the city). After only a week of this, the kicks aren’t enough, and when his wife (Virginia Christine of The Killers) falls off their apartment building trying to stop him from jumping, he takes responsibility so he can defeat the electric chair. But his lawyer gets him life in the pen, haha. I guess if he’d been good at thinking through consequences he wouldn’t have dealt with the devil in the first place, but Americans couldn’t be expected to know how to live immortally before Highlander came out.

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107. The Lonely

Jack Warden (best known for the Hubleys’ Dig) is losing his marbles alone on an asteroid, serving a prison sentence in solitary. Back home there’s political pressure to pardon Jack, who of course claims innocence, and/or abolish the asteroid prisons, possibly as much for its cruel-and-unusual nature as the difficulty of keeping the prisoners fed via rocketship deliveries. Space-warden John Dehner (killed by Gary Cooper the previous year in Man of the West) drops off a gift for Jack: an AI woman named Alicia (Jean Marsh, queen of Willow). It’s not implied that her womanness is a factor here, Jack just wants somebody to play chess with. He bonds with Alicia, then the captain brings a pardon for Jack on his next visit, and shoots Alicia in the face since she’ll be too heavy for the ship. New director Minnesotan Jack Smight would later make the post-apocalyptic Paul Winfield movie Damnation Alley.

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108. Time Enough at Last

Two man-alone-in-the-world episodes in a row? The one where banker Burgess “The Penguin” Meredith just wants some time to read but his horrid wife and boring boss (Vaughn Taylor, also the boss in Psycho) won’t let him. Time enough (and food enough, ammo enough) at last when he’s the sole survivor of a nuclear blast, but his glasses break on day two. Some nice-looking wreckage in the final stretch. Director John Brahm had made films in the 1940s, including a remake of The Lodger.

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109. Perchance to Dream

Nearly an it-was-all-a-dream episode. The title clues us in, and from a childhood watching Nightmare on Elm Street sequels I’m attuned to characters “just closing their eyes for a few seconds.” This one’s more of a narrated dream-flashback inside of a dream, as a nervous imaginative man with a heart condition explains to a psychiatrist that his subconscious has mixed up his sex/death drives and now a hot cat lady is trying to kill him with kicks (the Ann-Margret Kitten With a Whip kicks, not the Michelle Yeoh Executioners kicks). If he falls asleep he’ll fall off a rollercoaster / jump out the window, which he does. From the psych’s POV a guy he’s never seen before came into the office, lied down and promptly stopped living. Starting to think Serling created the show just so he could see every working actor play desperation in closeup. But this is the first one he didn’t write – Charles Beaumont (The Intruder) would become a regular on the series. Director Robert Florey had a long career, from the great silent short Life and Death of 9413 to the Marx Brothers, then 1930s and 40s crime movies. The psych later played Dirty Harry’s boss, lead dreamer Richard Conte was a noir regular.

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110. Judgment Night

Man onboard a British ship in dangerous waters during WWII has got an extreme combination of amnesia and deja vu. Carl (Nehemiah Persoff, father Mousekewitz in An American Tail) seems to have specific knowledge about German submarines stalking the ship, and when he goes down with the ship it’s revealed that Carl was that sub’s commander, and he’s in hell, nightly reliving the fate of his victims. A panic-stricken half-hour with a comforting message (the nazis that killed our family members are experiencing endless torment in the afterlife). His fellow doomed Brits include Patrick Macnee (originator of the Ralph Fiennes role in The Avengers, later in The Howling), Disney voice actor (and Sound of Music nazi) Ben Wright, and Cat o’ Nine Tails star James Franciscus.

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111. And When the Sky Was Opened

Two astronauts in recovery after a flight crash-landed, but Rod Taylor (The Birds) is in a complete panic because he claims there were three astronauts and that their friend Charles Aidman (narrator of the 1980s ‘Zone reboot) vanished and nobody remembers him ever existing except himself. We see them together in flashback then Aidman feels strange and says maybe we weren’t supposed to come back, and disappears from a phone booth, his beer magically gone with him and the headlines rewritten. Taylor responds the way people do in most Twilight Zones (and in all British horror), by blubbering and yelling and repeating himself. When he vanishes too, the remaining hospital-bound astronaut Jim Hutton (of Major Dundee, Timothy’s dad) knows he’s next. Director Douglas Heyes made Kitten With a Whip, and I didn’t know about him when I referenced that movie two episodes ago.

Taylor (right) with spaced-out Aidman:

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112. What You Need

There are plenty of salesmen in the Zone. This would seem to be an inspiration for King’s Needful Things, but our aged salesman (Ernest Truex of Christmas in July) isn’t malevolent, hands out humble objects that he predicts will help people in the future: a bus ticket for Read Morgan (a former baseballer playing a former baseballer) to get to his next gig, something for a lonely pretty girl (Arlene Martel, Spock’s fiancee) that gives her an excuse to meet a hunky (drunky) former baseballer. The salesman (whose character shares a name with the inventor of the Chia Pet) doesn’t want to deal with loser shithead Steve Cochran (White Heat) but the guy smells money and pesters then threatens the old man until he gets what he needs (a lifesaving tool, a bunch of money, an early grave). Based on a short story from the writers of The Twonky. Director Alvin Ganzer assisted on The Great McGinty and other 1940’s flicks then moved permanently to television.

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113. The Four of Us are Dying

A guy who the voiceover tells us is a real lowlife loser has the supernatural ability to face-shift and be other people. Apparently he’s pretty good at doing voices and knowing personal details about the people he imitates too, fooling friends and enemies. His default identity is Archie Hammer (Harry Townes), then he picks up the hot girlfriend (Corman/MST3K regular Beverly Garland) of late musician Ross Martin, then becomes late gangster Phillip Pine (loud and annoying in Murder by Contract) and runs off with a pocket full of dirty money, then to escape the gangsters he gets the face of Don Gordon off a boxing poster. Boxer Don (Bullitt, The Mack, gold miner in The Last Movie) was apparently such a lowlife that his dad shoots him (them) dead. A nice bluesy New York episode, features some fancy trick photography in the identity shifts, and some lazy edits when they didn’t need to be fancy. From George Johnson, story writer of Logan’s Run and Ocean’s Eleven.

Archie “Armie” Hammer:

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China III (1992, Tsui Hark)

Set in Beijing leading up to a grand lion king dance event. For a friendly sporting competition, a lot of guys sure get set on fire or catch spears through the chest. Focus is less on individual kung-fu, more on lion-head spectacle, though enemy-turned-ally Clubfoot (Xiong Xinxin, villain of The Blade) is the breakout star of the former. The comedy and romance get pretty bad – in fact anything that isn’t a lion-head dance is wasted time, and Foon is the worst offender. The photography is sharper than ever though, especially when Rosamund is around, and there’s some good shadowplay. Rosamund’s Russian motion-picture supplier turns out to be an assassin, caught in the act by his own tech.

New stunt coordinator Yuen Bun did Dragon Inn and the Royal Tramp movies the same year, later went on to work with Johnnie To on greats like Throw Down and Sparrow. Interesting to hear Tsui in the blu extras complain about lack of originality in modern film – everyone studies the same references and produces the same movies.

by ·Comments Off on 2551.01 (2021, Norbert Pfaffenbichler)

Laborious “Mad God but not good” vibes. The strobing pounding metal grotesque masked riot scene was a decent open, continues with monochrome cruelty (in every scene there’s some poor sucker who the others are beating). Throw in clowns and banana peels, silly music/sfx (laugh track?) in case we take the grim masked drama and Abu Ghraib references too seriously. The sudden stop/start of fast electro music just made me wonder if I could find the “Come On My Selector” video in high-def. In the end, it’s just an excuse to make lots and lots of masks, some of them really cool. Apparently during pandemic year one I spent an evening watching Nor-Pfaf movies, but now in the post-pand 2020s I remember nothing of previous years and rely on the movie memory blog more and more.

by ·Comments Off on Archangel (1990, Guy Maddin)

The madness, montage, and absurd deadpan humor has all been doubled in intensity from Gimli Hospital. Veronkha is married to amnesiac Ari Cohen (Page’s dad in The Tracey Fragments). One-legged Kyle McCulloch’s dead beloved was Iris, a lookalike of Veronkha. Michael Gottli (Gimli’s Gunnar) is blind again, with a wife who (I think) is not Veronkha. What happens in the second half, though? Maybe the least memorable Maddin movie, it casts an amnesiac spell on the viewer.

Jonathan Rosenbaum agrees… from Essential Cinema:

The superimposition of a late-20s / early-30s style over a story set around 1917 yields a movie that is oddly ahistorical and that seems set adrift from any sustained sense of place, time, or even meaning. The film’s true subject, in fact — if it has one at all — is amnesia: virtually all the major characters suffer from it acutely, to such a degree that they can barely grasp their own identities — or anyone else’s, for that matter. And the film induces a kind of existential free fall in the spectator that is oddly akin to the helplessness of the characters.

My HD copy was not HD, so the stills look crappy, but there was a nice shot of a wreath with the words “dispatched by wounds innumerable” on a little banner.

by ·Comments Off on Pictures of Ghosts (2023, Kleber Mendonca Filho)

Vital viewing for fans of Neighbouring Sounds, showing the history of Kleber’s family in their apartment where that movie was filmed. Funny, I mentioned Chris Marker in my writeup of his Green Vinyl, and the first thing I notice in his apartment is Marker’s book “Staring Back” – and I referenced Do The Right Thing in the same post, and here’s Kleber wearing a Do The Right Thing shirt. As Tsui Hark says, we all have the same references so we all make the same films. “Fiction films are the best documentaries” he says in part two, about the disappeared cinemas of Recife, Brazil, while reviewing the only known footage of certain destroyed landmarks in the backgrounds of features. The third part is the shortest, literally turning the locals into ghosts.

The director in Cinema Scope, on shooting digital:

At the end of the day it’s not the celluloid that makes a film, it’s the attitude that goes into each and every move … It’s quite perverse. I remember in the ’80s when CDs were introduced, the industry sold the idea that vinyl was nothing and you should get rid of it. It was part of the strategy to get CDs into people’s homes. In my family we kept the vinyl and also bought CDs. I like the idea of adding new ideas and experiences. I don’t understand why the industry always has to sell subtraction. With 35mm and digital, the best thing would be for me to have more options. But capitalism always finds a way to fuck everything up.

by ·Comments Off on The United States of America (2022, James Benning)

Title card says city/state, we see a two-minute shot of a location in that sate, and on to the next one. I knew the gimmick ahead of time – that each shot was actually made in California – but it didn’t harm the viewing experience at all. Movie says you’re in the future, you imagine the future. Movie says the past, you picture the past. Movie says Omaha Nebraska, who am I to argue? It’s well-researched, because Katy looked at the Minnesota shot and said that must be Hibbing, which is what the title card told us. Possible references to previous Benning films (there’s a train and a sky). Usually ambient sound but every eighth or tenth state there’s a voiceover about oppressed people. Aside from the game-playing and real/imagined locations, it’s a very relaxing movie to watch, even more so than the slower-paced Allensworth, but my imagination ran wild on Allensworth while this mostly felt picturesque.

Hibbing MN:

A remake of sorts, per Film Comment.

Benning:

“My main idea for this film was to set up a problem that is almost insolvable, which is what America is at this particular time … it’s not a film I made to fool anybody. I think it’s an important statement about how we can create what we think the U.S. is, and take it as real, even when it’s completely false. I think any construction of meaning for the U.S. can only be false, because how can you include everything? There’s always a contradiction.

Ajo AZ:

A James Benning history lesson from Erika Balsom in Ten Skies:

Benning’s interest in structure is of no recent vintage: his Grand Opera (1978) pays explicit homage to Snow and Frampton … [yet] the bulk of his production comes definitively after [structural film’s] heyday and breaks with some of its key features. As the seventies wore on, many came to see the purging of content characteristic of structural film as a dead end and began to re-engage with narrative. Formal rigour was not so much abandoned as it was increasingly complemented by concerns with subjectivity and the social. Benning’s practice, particularly as it developed through the eighties and nineties, is best understood as part of this multifaceted response to avant-garde cinema’s high modernist moment.
…
By Ten Skies (2004), Benning had left behind the discursivity of earlier works … to adopt a metric form almost entirely free of written or spoken language. From the new talkies to the newer silents. The film is, in some sense, a resurrection of the reductionist, phenomenological impulse that Sitney saw as being at the heart of structural film. In the early twenty-first century, as cinema migrated and mutated under the pressures of technological change, such ontological inquiries assumed a renewed relevance.
…
If, for structural film, the screen was primarily a surface, for Benning it is both surface and window. His interest in structure is not a matter of making content subsidiary to outline but in exploring the tension that exists between the two … As Benning describes Ten Skies, ‘The structure itself is rigid, and then what it’s containing is fluid. It’s almost like a sieve.’

Durkee OR:

Benning in Film Comment again:

Artists are often afraid of humor. And then when people write about my films, they want to shy away from it, too, because somehow [they think] humor demeans the work. But I don’t believe that at all. I think things are funny. And sometimes you don’t make them up. Like the shot of the horses in the film that are staring at the camera. They’re motionless except for their ears, which move a little bit. They’re completely hilarious, but in a very sad way. Or the racetrack shot, with just five cars in the race, and one car getting further and further behind. It’s kind of a pathetic race, even though the audience really seems to be enjoying it. I think that’s hilarious.