by ·Comments Off on Women In Love (1969, Ken Russell)

“It may be over between us, but it’s not finished.”

I find it immediately annoying that the first two listed stars of WOMEN in Love are Alan Bates and Oliver Reed. Women can’t even star in their own movie! But I stopped being annoyed almost immediately. I think this was Ken’s third theatrical feature after Billion Dollar Brain and the little-known French Dressing, and it’s intoxicating, successfully applying all his (and his actors’) stylistic excess to a period novel by D.H. Lawrence about doomed rich people.

Jackson taunts some cows:

Linden and Bates:

The doom begins early on, as all our main characters meet at the wedding of two vibrant young lovers who drown together soon afterwards. I think Oliver Reed (star of The Devils) was the bride’s brother, and Bates (The Go-Between, Dr. M) is his friend.

Reed:

Also at the party: two sisters with great names (Gudrun and Ursula) and extravagant, attention-grabbing host Eleanor Bron (four years after Help!), who is dating major romantic Bates until he takes up with Ursula (Jennie Linden, lately of a Dr. Who movie), while his more intense, coal-mine manager buddy Reed goes with red-haired Gudrun (Glenda Jackson of Hopscotch, later an anti-Thatcher member of parliament who ran twice for mayor of London)

Thinking ’bout Eleanor Bron:

Bates and Ursula get married and take a ski trip with the others. Reed is jealous and old-fashioned, disapproves of Gudrun’s friendship with a local sculptor, finally nearly strangles her then tromps off into the snow to freeze to death.

The title made me think there’d be a lesbian story but instead we get Bates and Reed wrestling completely nude by the fire, and the ending implies that the great love story of the film was Bates and Reed’s friendship.

This movie got heaps of award nominations including 11 from the Baftas (but Midnight Cowboy and Oh! What a Lovely War cleaned up) and 4 from the Oscars, with Glenda Jackson winning most of them, and made Russell’s reputation in Britain. Wikipedia says the book was a sequel (the sisters appeared in earlier novel The Rainbow) and Bates’s character may have been Lawrence’s stand-in.

by ·Comments Off on Machete Kills (2013, Robert Rodriguez)

Psychotically entertaining, probably endlessly rewatchable, continuing adventures of Danny Trejo. Machete’s old friend Jessica Alba is killed early on by a Mexican-wrestler-masked Mel Gibson, so he takes a revenge job from President Charlie Sheen, tracked by a killer called El Cameleon (who is disguised as Walton Goggins, Cuba Gooding Jr, Lady Gaga and Antonio Banderas before being dispatched by rednecks). Machete’s handler Amber Heard turns bad. He captures schizo Demian Bichir, who kills his own daughter Vanessa Hudgens, earning wrath of her mother, brothel mistress Sofia Vergara. Finally eyepatched Michelle Rodrigues shows up with bomb expert Tom Savini (a reformed villain from the last movie). Also, William Sadler is an immigrant-hating sheriff, and Marko Zaror plays ass-kicking clones. All this, plus teasers for Machete Kills Again… In Space.

by ·Comments Off on As Long As You’ve Got Your Health (1966, Pierre Etaix)

There’s something to this Etaix rediscovery after all. This is a disarmingly funny series of shorts cobbled together into a feature – I figured it’d make for a good Etaix intro. I’ve seen him as an actor recently in Le Havre, and he looks not entirely different 45 years earlier. Cowriter Jean-Claude Carriere also worked on Bunuel’s late films

DCairns: “Into a perfect, crisp frame steps a man who is as elegant and sharp as his own composition and who moves in rhythm with the film around him, every changing angle of his body a graphic/poetic statement. You may mistake his silhouette for another’s—but not when it moves. And movement is his art form.”

Insomnia
In color, Etaix stays awake reading a vampire novel, seen in b/w episodes, as his wife sleeps next to him. The stories start to affect each other, culminating in the wife becoming a vampire.

The Movies
1960’s version of the annoyances encountered when going out to the movies – things were difficult even before cell phones. This turns into an extended advertising parody.

As Long As You’ve Got Your Health
A wide view of bustling city life – “everyone’s nerves are constantly shot”. Crowds, traffic, noise, pollution, construction conspire to make living hell. It seems more apocalyptically negative now than it did while watching it.

Into The Woods No More
Sepia-toned segment where a hunter keeps annoying a farmer, who thinks a nearby picnicking couple is to blame for his troubles.

by ·Comments Off on Through a Glass Darkly (1961, Ingmar Bergman)

This might be the beginning of Late-Period Bergman – I’ve seen none before except Persona. He was the son of a major pastor, and the DVD extras say he was “coming to terms with religious baggage of his past” in this thematic trilogy. He “renounced a lot of the expressionism of the 50’s that he’d been known for,” but the compositions, in less stark black-and-white than before, are still striking.

Karin (Harriet Andersson: Monika, Petra in Smiles of a Summer Night) is on Bergman’s beloved island of Faro with younger brother Minus (Lars Passgard, who would not be a Bergman regular), husband Max von Sydow, and father Gunnar Bjornstrand (self-important Egerman in Smiles, Sydow’s challenger in The Magician). Things start out on shaky ground – she’s just back from psychiatric hospital where she got shock treatment, and when dad gets a moment alone he sobs in his office – and only get worse. An hour in, I was wondering which one of them would commit suicide – each seemed pretty likely – then a moment later Gunnar started speaking of his suicide attempt.

Karin finds her novelist dad’s diary about her illness. Minus gets caught looking at dirty pictures, always seems on the edge of panic, has incestual complications. Max is getting no love from his crazy wife, starts a bitter fight with Gunnar over his creative bankruptcy and exploitation of his daughter’s illness. But Karin is worse off than they realize, starts standing in an empty room staring at a crack in the wallpaper and insisting that God is going to come through.

“Your faith and your doubt are very unconvincing. All that’s apparent is your ingenuity.” Harsh words spoken by a character within a film series about faith and doubt. “Don’t you think I know that,” Gunnar responds, a bit of Bergman self-criticism, doubt about his own doubtfulness.

“The door opened, but the God that came out was a spider,” Karin says, resigned to a horrible fate just before the ambulance takes her away again. “Papa spoke to me” are the movie’s final words, a glimmer of hope from poor Minus.

P. Matthews on the Euro-arthouse films of the early 1960’s:

The denuded purity of its sacred texts was an implicit rebuke to Hollywood budgetary decadence, just as their oracular obscurity challenged a feel-good escapism whose meanings were only too pat.
…
A reprieve is nonetheless granted through earthly love – a coda shows the aloof father chastened and struggling to bond with his neglected son. That the director himself found this optimism facile can be judged from the diminishing spiritual returns in the trilogy, culminating in the almost total cosmic nullity of The Silence.

by ·Comments Off on Cloud Atlas (2012, Wachowskis & Tom Tykwer)

I think if Cloud Atlas took itself and its themes and lessons super-seriously it could have been tragically awful. The nursing home segment, genre thrills and obviously silly makeup help keep things on the amusing side. Another way to make the movie awful would be to present it as an anthology, separating the stories and letting each play through, since the main interesting thing about the film is its cross-cutting and the tentative connections between segments, previous events echoing into later ones, sometimes misinterpreted.

Clown Atlas:

Movie is full of “oh who is that guy, I’ve seen him before” moments, but mostly it’s because the same actor played a different role in the previous scene. I kept getting Ben Whishaw (of Bright Star and I’m Not There, playing the young composer/amanuensis) mixed up with Jim Sturgess, and wrongly imagined one or both of them might be Benedict Cumberbatch.

Pacific Islands, 1849: Mad doctor Tom Hanks poisons Jim Sturgess for his money aboard a slave ship.

Cambridge, 1936: Two guys in love – Ben Whishaw goes to work for composer Jim Broadbent (the second movie I’ve seen with an amanuensis after Delius – suppose it’s a cinematic way of showing the artistic creation process) and later kills himself.

San Francisco, 1973: Halle Berry is a reporter onto a murderous secret over some nuclear files provided by the guy from 1936 who didn’t kill himself (a Ralph Fiennes-looking James D’Arcy).

London, 2012: Gangsta author Hanks kills a literary critic, story follows his agent Jim Broadbent to a prison-like old folks home (governed by evil nurse Hugo Weaving) from which he plots to escape.

Neo Seoul, 2144: Doona Bae is a “fabricant”, a robot slave, freed in mind and body by militant freedom fighter Jim Sturgess – very Matrix-meets-V-for-Vendetta.

Big Isle, 106 Winters After The Fall: Hanks is tribal type haunted by an evil clown, rescues space-travelin’ Berry from cannibal warriors led by Hugh Grant.

Susan Sarandon also appears, and Wachowski favorite Hugo Weaving is everywhere. I never recognized Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) as the poisoned lawyer on the ship and lead revolutionary of Neo Seoul, Doona Bae (sister/archer in The Host) as the escaped fabricant, nor Keith David (The Thing, They Live) as the cop who helps reporter Berry in the 70’s. Also lost track of what the comet birthmark shared by some characters signified.

by ·Comments Off on Leviathan (2012, Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel)

Shame to watch a sensual-experience movie on the laptop, but it didn’t play theaters here.
At least it was in HD and I used headphones.

P. Coldiron has a terrific article in Cinema Scope, which I won’t overquote.
“Sensual time has replaced historical time. .. It would make no sense to follow these fisherman back to the sale of their haul, because at no point does the film acknowledge the sort of time that renders an event complete.”

by ·Comments Off on I Married a Witch (1942, Rene Clair)

Fun movie, but I made the mistake of reading the Guy Maddin article before watching. The movie itself could never live up to that article! French expatriate Clair directs Veronica Lake (the year after Sullivan’s Travels but looking five years sexier, err, older) as a witch who spends centuries imprisoned in a tree with warlock Daniel (Cecil Kellaway, entertainingly overdoing it), overseeing their curse upon the family line of mayoral candidate Fredric March (PTSD’d husband of Myrna Loy in The Best Years of Our Lives). Lightning strikes the tree, the tricksters escape, and she falls for March, deciding to ditch the warlock and break up his engagement to cold Susan Hayward, daughter of the newspaperman (Robert Warwick, studio boss in Sullivan’s Travels and a big star back in 1915) helping March get elected. Comedian Robert Benchley plays March’s buddy and professional auntie/grandma Elizabeth Patterson his housekeeper. Kind of a naughty movie. Not surprising that Preston Sturges was involved with this – he quit and had his credit removed.

by ·Comments Off on Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965, Freddie Francis)

Another horror anthology from the writer/director of Tales from the Crypt, this one with an even weaker framing story. But now it’s Peter Cushing’s turn to be the arch-villain (vith ze fake german accent), a psychic who predicts very specific supernatural deaths for everyone riding in his train car, including skeptic Christopher Lee.

First, Neil McCallum (of forgotten thriller Catacombs) is an architect who clumsily frees an evil werewolf from inside the walls of old Mrs. Biddulph’s home, faces the consequences.

In the silliest segment, Bill (BBC DJ Alan Freeman) brings home botanist Jeremy Kemp (of Blake Edwards’s Darling Lili) to examine his haunted vine. “A plant like that could take over the world,” Bill is told, before it kills them all.

Next, Roy Castle, who joined Cushing in a Dr. Who movie the same year, is musician Biff Bailey. He travels to the West Indies, disrespects voodoo rituals and makes a jazz arrangement of their sacred music, bringing vengeance in the form of a face-painted black man who appears in Biff’s apartment and murders him. Pretty much the same plot as the Papa Benjamin episode of Thriller a few years earlier.

Roy runs across the movie’s own poster:

For some reason the movie doesn’t save the skeptic’s episode for last. “I live by my vision,” says art critic Christopher Lee, so of course he is blinded in crash. But first, he has a cruel rivalry with painter Michael Gough (The Horse’s Mouth), crushes Gough’s hand in a hit-and-run, then after Gough kills himself the hand follows Lee, causing the blinding crash. At least it’s more eventful than the haunted vine.

Finally young doctor Donald Sutherland (in only his second real film role) brings home new wife Nicole (Jennifer Jayne of MST3K-bait The Crawling Eye). Max Adrian (Delius in Delius) is the only other doctor in town, suspects that the blood-drinking bat-morphing Nicole might be a vampire, convinces Donald to kill her with a stake. Twist: Max Adrian is a vampire using Donald to eliminate his competition, as Donald is carted off to jail.

But wait – they were dead all along!

But wait – if that’s true, what was the point of all the stories? Each passenger, even skeptic Christopher Lee, queasily accepted his own ludicrous tale of future demise, never interjecting “oh I doubt a vine is going to kill my whole family” or “but I’ve never even been to the West Indies,” or “then I won’t dig the werewolf casket out of the lady’s wall, so now do I get to live?” The tales are assumed to take place in the future, since on the train Lee is not blind, and Donald is not in jail. Then they’re all supposedly killed in a train accident, so either Dr. Terror was completely fucking with them or else he was holding them captive with his stories in order that they would die – but without the stories, where else would they have gone? All I’m saying is that Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors might contain some inconsistencies.