What can you say? Sometimes the genocidal killers win, stay in charge, and have no reason to feel shame for what they’ve done. Someone finally got the great idea to interview these people and allow them to glorify/incriminate themselves. Letting them tell their own stories through filmmaking and showing the behind-the-scenes process was a stroke of genius, and filming it must’ve felt terrible and dangerous, as evidenced by all the anonymously-credited crew members.
Never go to Indonesia.
I thought everyone in Outrage had been killed except for one cop and new boss Kato, but here’s Takeshi still alive and I had to try to keep track of the various crime families again. This did turn out better than the original, but I’m still hoping Election and Drug War destroy ’em both.
People: Tomokazu Miura of M/Other is in charge of some clan, and young hotshot Ryo Kase of I Just Didn’t Do It and Like Someone In Love is his #2 man.
Takeshi and Kimura:
Takeshi teams up with scarfaced ex-rival Kimura with his two dumb-as-hell employees to wage war on these guys. Baddies are brought low by other baddies. Another clan is somehow involved. The Japanese Dr. Guggenheim (Akira Nakao, a regular in 1990’s Godzilla movies) is the first to die. Then lots more die. There is a brief appearance by a woman.
The Japanese Dr. Guggenheim:
We get two partner cops to identify with. Sourface Shigeta (Yutaka Matsushige of Last Life in the Universe) is the outsider who needs everything explained to him, and his sneaky balding corrupt partner (Fumiyo Kohinata of Dark Water) wants to start some shit and get the action going. Beat Takeshi shoots the balding guy at the end, after everyone else is already dead.
L-R: balding cop, sourface cop
A good variety of music, and the score has hints of Dead Man. Scenes end with fade-outs as if to provide space for TV ads. My main concern was listening to the language and noting that half of all sentences end with a sound like arrOH, or errOR. Fumi thinks it’s some kinda gangster embellishment.
This was fun. I suppose I can forgive The Squid and the Whale now. Greta Gerwig (best known as the first victim in House of the Devil) wants to be a famous dancer, will never be a famous dancer, is kind of unsufferable but cute enough that you forgive her. A better movie than Monsters University about childhood dreams and hard work not entirely working out. Katy cringed a lot during the most Baumbachesque scene, an ultra-awkward dinner conversation, while I was busy trying to figure why Dean & Britta were in the scene.
Revisiting this after watching so many Rivette movies. The sound design, amplifying ordinary noise from clothes, floors and chairs, usually uncovered by music, is the main familiar element. It may be his most tightly structured film, without any improv, though I’d have to watch it back-to-back with Don’t Touch the Axe to be sure.
“In marrying your sisters, we’ve ruined ourselves.” Anna Karina, towards the end of her Godard relationship, is sent to become a nun by her parents against her will in the mid-1700’s. To her, the experience is just like prison, but she manages to sneak out some letters and secures herself a lawyer (soundtrack plays ocean waves when she’s finally allowed to see him), incurring the wrath of head nun Francine Berge (gorgeous baddie of Franju’s Judex), until her punishment is finally noted by Berge’s superiors and Anna is moved to a new convent.
Karina and Berge have a nun-off:
The new one is a pleasure palace, run by clingy lesbian Liselotte Pulver (of A Time to Love and a Time to Die), whom the father confessor tells Anna to avoid like the devil. Anna doesn’t like this place any more than the last one, finally teams up with an amorous monk (Francisco Rabal, whose face was ripped off in Dagon) to escape. Best scene is with him, as she realizes his intentions and the music goes mental.
Karina and Pulver bond:
Anna flees him and he’s captured – oh, and her mom is dead, her friend who talked her into becoming a nun in the first place (Micheline Presle, Depardieu’s relative in I Want To Go Home) is dead, and now her lawyer is dead. Then she flees the village where she’s hiding out, gets picked off the street by a fancy lady, and finally flees her party right out an upper-story window. This made more sense once the internet told me the “fancy lady” was a prostitute, oops. C. Clouzot: “Rivette completes Diderot’s unfinished novel with her suicide.”
brief moment of happiness, post-escape:
the end is near:
Banned in France for over a year, with much public debate leading up to its eventual release. It’s funny now that this movie was considered so outrageous, falling five years after Mother Joan of the Angels and five before The Devils. Quite a good movie, even if not extremely Rivettian. Cinematographer Alain Levent worked on the first films by Chabrol, Rohmer and Truffaut, shot Cleo from 5 to 7, The Nun and later, Sam Fuller’s Day of Reckoning and Madonna and the Dragon. Adapted again (sort of) by Joe D’Amato in the 80’s and there’s a new version out with Isabelle Huppert.
I liked Helen Mirren’s dragon dean.
And the hissing vampire sorority, or whatever that was.
Sometimes hard work and following your dreams just isn’t enough.
The Blue Umbrella (2013, Saschka Unseld)
A remake of Paperman using photorealistic umbrellas with cartoon faces!
Jean Arthur in her fourth-to-last movie. Her gentle, distinctively high voice floats above the constant hiss of background noise, barely audible but still clear as day.
She flees her three obnoxious suitors: pathetic, proper Grady Sutton (baddie of The Sun Shines Bright), unmemorable middleman Hans Conried and crude, punchy Grant Withers (a Clanton clansman in My Darling Clementine) for a Western bus tour, then loses the bus, ending up with handsome rodeo cowboy John Wayne (four years after Stagecoach but still not above crap like this).
Also, Charles Winninger, Judge Priest himself in The Sun Shines Bright (IMDB calls him “ever-huggable”) does his best Stumpy impression as Duke’s buddy Waco.
Seiter, eight years and 25 movies after Roberta, cranking ’em out too fast. Story writer Jo Swerling was oscar-nominated the previous year, would later cowrite Guys & Dolls on broadway. Produced by Jean Arthur’s husband, who cowrote her The More The Merrier the same year.
My favorite sentence from the TCM synopsis: “Joining Mollie in the hay, Duke warns her that he isn’t marriage material and speaks fondly of his horse, Sammy.”
Aliens vs. Robots.
Robots win.
Stars Stringer as Stacker in Striker. Bland main guy is Charlie Hunnam, Ron Perlman’s Sons of Anarchy costar. Rinko Kikuchi was the newcomer who got all the buzz in Babel, later in The Brothers Bloom and Norwegian Wood. Stacker is father-figure to Rinko, who is soulmate bro-bot to Hunnam. Two scientists are racing for the bomb that is the prize: stuffy Brit is Burn Gorman of BBC’s Bleak House, excitable kaiju fan is Charlie Day of It’s Always Sunny. Lot of TV actors here. There are other foreign robot pilot teams, all dead, all dead. And Ron Perlman plays a huge badass. Obviously.
A murderous road comedy. So far Wheatley is living up to the hype, even if I wasn’t thrilled by the ending of Kill List – this was fully excellent, with much more interesting filmmaking than most comedies. Beardy Chris and girlfriend Tina go on a sightseeing tour and accidentally kill a guy… then they just keep killing people.
Made myself a note while watching that this should be some sort of baseline for filmmakers. Got a screenplay and want to shoot it. Watch Sightseers. Think you can do better? No? Then just quit now.
“Murderer.”
“It was an accident, mum.”
“So were you.”
“I don’t think I could cope without potpourri”
“Did you kill Ian?”
“Yeah. Well, I mean…”
“Season of the Witch” plays over two killing scenes. Chris and Tina were also the screenwriters. Tina is Alice Lowe: Liz from Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, also in My Life in Film and Hot Fuzz (worked for Timothy Dalton at the supermarket). Wheatley already has a new movie out, which I must see.
Mouse-over image to see Tina’s owl face:
“I just want to be feared and respected.”
That Firefly movie exploring the secret origins of super-weapon-girl River who’s being hunted by sword-toting government agent Chiwetel Ejiofor, and the secret origins of the Reavers. Hmmm, Rivers and Reavers.
Some main characters from the show (which I still haven’t watched all the way through) are killed. Sweet long traveling shot at the start shows off the entire ship and all the main characters.
Where’d they all go? Mal (Nathan Fillion) stars on Castle, River (Summer Glau) was on The Cape and Sarah Connor Chronicles, her brother Simon (Sean Maher) is in Much Ado, Jayne (Adam Baldwin) was on Chuck, Zoe (Gina Torres) is on Suits, pilot Wash (Alan Tudyk) did Dollhouse, played King Candy and is on Suburgatory, Kaylee (Jewel Staite) was on a Stargate series and The Killing, love interest Inara (Morena Baccarin) starred on Homeland and V, Shepherd Book (Ron Glass) was in Lakeview Terrace and one-man-NSA Mr. Universe (David Krumholtz) stars on Numb3rs.
Also watched Cabin in the Woods for a third time with dad – and this is a couple weeks after Katy and I saw Much Ado About Nothing, so it’s been a very Whedon month.