by ·Comments Off on Big Deal on Madonna St. (1958, Mario Monicelli)

Rewatched Rififi recently after reading that this is supposed to be a parody. Instead of a team of experts successfully pulling a heist then getting killed off by rivals in the aftermath, we’ve got a team of incompetents who botch the planning and the heist itself, escaping with their lives and nothing more.

Cosimo (Memmo Carotenuto, a croaking Eugene Pallette type) is arrested ineptly breaking into cars, forms the heist master plan but gets edged out of the group. Peppe the boxer (ladies’ man Vittorio Gassman) takes over, teams with aged Cappanelle, tough-looking mama’s boy Mario, new dad Tiberio (Marcello Mastroianni, a couple years before La Dolce Vita) and suave mustache man Michele who keeps his virginal sister Carmelina (Claudia Cardinale in her first year in the movies) locked in their apartment. The plan involves Peppe dating a girl who lives above the shop they plan to rob, gaining access to the building through her.

L-R: Mario, Michele, Cappanelle, Peppe and Tiberio:

By the time of the heist, Cosimo is dead (run down by a bus trying to purse-snatch), Tiberio’s arm is broken, Mario is fooling around with Carmelina, and Peppe’s girl has quit her job. They break in anyway, fail to get the safe, just steal some food from the kitchen, knock down a wall, then slink away. Reads like there’s a ton of comic business, but for an Italian comedy it’s actually pretty subdued.

Mario meets Claudia Cardinale:

Based partly on an Italo Calvino story – what?

by ·Comments Off on Neighbouring Sounds (2012, Kleber Mendonca Filho)

A Do The Right Thing setup, introducing the neighbors along a suburban Brazilian street, including young lovers, a stressed-out mom, a petty thief with rich parents. Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos of Elite Squad 2) appears, setting up a street security force with the backing of the neighors, including an elder Donald Sutherland type (Francisco) who used to run this town. It’s all infused with a sense of slow dread seemingly leading nowhere major but enjoyable on its own, until Clodualdo’s final revelation at Francisco’s house, confronting the colonial sugar-mill owner with his past crimes before the movie ends abruptly in fireworks.

The movie draws its menace from the fences and bars, the security force and barking dogs, tension between neighbors and classes, dreams of hordes of street kids hopping the fences and murdering us all. It also sets you up to identify with Clodoaldo and his group, giving as Cinema Scope points out “the simultaneous sense .. of being inside and outside the community.”

Cinefest played it in the wrong ratio so everyone looked thinner, with some digital glitches – all forgiveable, since they played it at all.

A. Cutler:

The street on which the main action unfolds is his actual street; the apartment of one of the protagonists, the stir-crazy housewife Bia (played by Maeve Jinkings), is his apartment; the dog whose persistent barking drives Bia bonkers is his neighbor’s dog. Many of the film’s incidents, often charged with implicit racial or class tensions, came directly from things he had lived, and its mixing of genres—drama, comedy, action, horror—came from the mind of someone who regards daily life as material for cinema.

Green Vinyl (2004)
Also watched an earlier short by this director, set in the same neighborhood. A montage of still photos, a la La Jetee or Dog’s Dialogue. Mom gives Daughter a box of 45’s, says she must promise to never play the green one. Daughter ONLY plays the green one, keeps doing so even though it kills her mother, one limb at a time, like Monty Python’s black knight (and similarly unconcerned, always with a loving smile). “Freely adapted from a Russian fairy tale” was the only explanation I could find.

by ·Comments Off on The Lords of Salem (2012, Rob Zombie)

“Bleed us a king”

Whoa. The witchiest, most satanic movie of our time. House of the Devil cries back home to its mother while Lords of Salem goes out and burns down the neighborhood. Zombie knows how to build atmosphere, but his movies have also had portions of gleeful camp and self-awareness until this one, risking playing it straight up to a final burst of 1970’s psychedelia.

Sheri Moon Zombie is a Salem radio DJ alongside her sometime-boyfriend, beardy Jeff Phillips, and Rob Zombie regular and Dawn of the Dead star Ken Foree. But she starts to have headaches and experience weird visions and dreams after receiving a record by the titular Lords.

Meanwhile in way-back-story, Sheri’s ancestor Reverend Hawthorne (Andrew Prine, deputy of The Town That Dreaded Sundown) tortured and burned a bunch of suspected witches to death. In typical movie fashion, the modern witches (led by Sheri’s landlady and her “sisters”) now want revenge through the Reverend’s descendant, using her to summon some great evil. But atypically, they succeed. Local historian Bruce Davison (deadly dreamer of The Lathe of Heaven, mighty morphin’ senator in X-Men) learns more and more about the history and current events then is suddenly killed by Sheri’s landlady (Judy Geeson of To Sir With Love) and her two “sisters”, Dee Wallace (House of the Devil, The Frighteners) and palmreader Patricia Quinn (Rocky Horror). The Lords “concert” begins, everyone in attendance ends up dead with Sheri missing, and the Devil only knows what happens next.

Funny that Bruce Davison’s role was suposed to be played by Bruce Dern since I thought Meg Foster rather looked like Dern – until she got naked, which she did often. Saw Sid Haig’s name in the credits and kicked myself for not having recognized him, but IMDB says he was cut. It also says there were no digital effects, but I guess that doesn’t account for the melting-Jesus animation in one of the freakout scenes. Good use of a couple VU & Nico songs, speaking of those.

–
Oct 2023: Yep, it’s a good one.

by ·Comments Off on The Angels’ Share (2012, Ken Loach)

A unexpectedly cheerful Scotland fantasy from Mr. Loach. He sets up the grim realism: new dad Robbie is a habitual fuckup living out a cycle of violence and poverty – but then over the credits we get a semi-comic montage of other young fuckups being assigned community service, including hilariously dense baldie Albert, compulsive shoplifter Mo, and less-distinguishable Rhino (William Ruane of Loach’s Sweet Sixteen). The four end up in a work program under whiskey enthusiast Harry (John Henshaw of Red Riding), and Robbie (Paul Brannigan, whom Katy thinks is hot, soon to appear in Jonathan Glazer’s first film since Birth) proves to have a fine nose for whisky.

Harry is full of empathy for his young charges, especially Robbie, and Robbie also has his girl Leonie (and, to a much lesser extent, her dad) on his side, so we’re all set for a heartwarming story where Robbie grows away from his violent past and gets a whiskey-related job with collector Roger Allam (Peter Mannion in The Thick of It season 2; Katy says he looks too much like Christopher Hitchens). And we get that, but after one last heist, as the four pilfer some of the rarest whisky in the world from a recently-discovered cask on its eve of auction. Movie might be giving its hopeless protag too easy of a ride out of the slums, too many side characters willing to spend their time, love and money on him, but for a director whose work is usually called “miserablism,” it’s forgiveable.

by ·Comments Off on Cartoon College (2012, Josh Melrod & Tara Wray)

The movie was fine, the soul-crushing (if you’re an aspiring artist) story of a graduating class at a comics school. More memorable will be the experience, since I got to run the feature and preceding presentation from the projection room, playing it from a blu-ray I authored and burned.

While working on the disc, I’d tried to avoid spoilers, not watching any full scene for fear that there’d be little in the movie to warrant a second or third viewing on event day. Confoundingly, I ended up enjoying this more than my much-anticipated Photographic Memory. It’s nothing unique from a filmmaking perspective, but competently made and full of pathos in the form of aspiring comic artists in over their heads.

by ·Comments Off on Photographic Memory (2011, Ross McElwee)

“There were always secrets to be uncovered in the most mundane of photographs.”

I’ve waited a long time since the great Bright Leaves with its promising ending. After spending that whole movie looking into the past, Ross shows his son Adrian playing at the beach and looks towards the future. That future is now and Adrian is graduating high school, but Ross being Ross, he retreats back into the past, using his son as an excuse to revisit some people and places from when father was the same age as son, trying to find a place for himself after graduation.

The present segments don’t work for me. Ross plays the old fogey card, telling us he can’t understand his son with all the iphones and the internets and the facebooks, dismissing technology while shooting on a digital camera. Adrian seems to be doing fine, talks to his father plenty and goes on fishing trips, is taking up videography (they help on each other’s projects), so the frame story’s attempts to tell us that the two are unable to connect seem untrue, as do Ross’s claims that his son is lost and aimless, since we see Adrian stunt-skiing, writing films and developing his own media startup.

Ross retreats to France, seeking his old photographer boss (Maurice) and his girlfriend from a few months later (Maud). He marvels at the changes that time brings, finds the late Maurice’s ex-wife and finally finds Maud. Ross and Maud each thinks that they’re the one who ended the relationship, after which she married another photographer. I’m sure it was an extremely cathartic trip for Ross, and it comes off as a reasonably pleasant trip for us, really coming together when Ross gets back home with Adrian in the last few minutes.

by ·Comments Off on The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, Alfred Hitchcock)

Some boring rich vacationers casually befriend a spy who is immediately killed, shot whilst dancing. Their daughter is kidnapped to shut them up. The couple (Leslie Banks, star of The Fire Raisers the same year, and Edna Best of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) sulks back to Britain sans daughter, deciding that if they can’t tell the police, at least they can solve the case themselves. Actually, espionage and adventure isn’t for ladies, so Banks goes off on his own.

Banks and Wakefield go to the dentist:

A sinister dentist is dispatched with his own gas, and I didn’t exactly get the involvement of a basement-dwelling cult (“The Tabernacle of the Sun”), but wooden chairs prove to be good defence against revolvers, and the place gets trashed. Some delightful villains emerge, much more colorful than the heroes (despite an aborted attempt to involve a monocled uncle, Hugh Wakefield of Blithe Spirit, as comic relief). Prominently-chinned Frank Vosper (who’d soon die falling off an ocean liner) and frown-mouthed nurse Cicely Oates would’ve been fine, but Peter Lorre…

DCairns:

Frank Vosper is a good sleazoid bad guy (the only obvious thing Hitch took from Waltzes), but obviously Peter Lorre is the important character here. Although the plot throws out a whole gallery of malefactors, including an old lady with a revolver, a threatening dentist, and an evil hypnotist, Lorre dominates effortlessly, just by constantly making strange. Still sporting the carnival-float head of solid fat he modeled in Lang’s M, and decorated with a skunk-like white stripe and a dueling scar to match Banks’, Lorre as “Abbott” drools cigarette-smoke and apologises to the hero after striking him. He’s good-naturedly contemptuous of his own hired hitman, devoted to his nurse, and prefers to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, but his goal is to plunge the world into war.

Trying to rescue his daughter, Banks gets kidnapped too, caught in the villains’ hideout during a massive police shootout after an Edna Best-thwarted assassination attempt at the Royal Albert Hall. Best then shows up at the shootout and saves her own daughter from Vosper, some 70 minutes after the movie pointedly established her as a celebrated sharpshooter.

Pilbeam and Oates:

No insufferable child actor, daughter Nova Pilbeam is a daughter worth saving, out-acting both of her parents at times. She would return as star of Hitch’s Young and Innocent. This was the first of Hitch’s six Gaumont movies, and Lady Vanishes (more vacationers caught up with spy rings and kidnappings) was the last. Must now watch the ones in between.

by ·Comments Off on Eyes Without a Face (1960, Georges Franju)

“The dead should keep quiet.”

Now that i’ve watched Franju’s Shadowman and Judex, lesser-known masterpieces of light, shadow and creepy atmosphere with pulpy serial subjects, it’s time to revisit the original. I’m not sure how he got from Blood of the Beast to the psychiatric hospital drama Head Against the Wall, but as cofounder of the Cinematheque Francaise, perhaps he had an omnivorous love for poetic film in all forms.

Upbeat carnival music – not creepy sounding, which possibly makes it even creepier – as a woman with a pearl necklace (Alida Valli of The Third Man, schoolmistress of Suspiria) furtively dumps a trenchcoated faceless body (movie always fades out quickly after showing us anything faceless) into the river. She works for surgeon Pierre Brasseur (the actor Lemaitre in Children of Paradise), who saved her face from disfigurement and hopes to completely recreate a face for his even-more-disfigured daughter Edith Scob, who spends most of the movie behind an uncanny featureless mask, as recently spotted at the end of Holy Motors.

In her full-faced years, Edith dated a handsome young doctor with plastic hair (Francois Guerin of The Aristocrats), who suspects she is still alive and involves a heavy-set inspector (Alexandre Rignault of La Chienne and Mon Oncle d’Amerique) in the case. I get the young doctor confused with a young cop (Claude Brasseur, Pierre’s son, of The Elusive Corporal), but neither of them ultimately matters.

L-R: elder Brasseur, elder cop, young doctor, young Brasseur/cop:

Paulette having her treatment:

The very reasonable-acting mad doctor kidnaps more girls, attempting to graft their faces onto his daughter’s to only temporary avail – first Edna (Juliette Mayniel of Chabrol’s Les Cousins), who escapes into the main house then suicides when she sees herself in a mirror, then police-plant Paulette (Beatrice Altariba, Cosette in the Jean Gabin Les Miserables). Faceless Edith, hidden away in her room with no entertainment except her own funeral program, finally loses her patience, frees Paulette, stabs the pearl-choker assistant in the throat and sets the lab dogs loose on her dad, then wanders outside, a walking statue surrounded by doves.

Franju made after Head Against the Wall, assisted by Claude Sautet (a noted director in the 1970’s). Cinematographer Eugen Schufftan had shot People On Sunday, worked with GW Pabst, Max Ophuls, Rene Clair and Edgar Ulmer. A quiet movie but for the judicious, counterintuitive use of upbeat music.

by ·Comments Off on Raising Arizona (1987, Coen Bros)

Habitual thief marries cop, they steal baby, then every other character in the movie (his boss, his prison buddies, the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse) try to steal him back.

Some similarities to the later Wild at Heart: Nic Cage, wide-open Western locations, amour fou, people exploding. Is it just me, or is there an Evil Dead reference in the low, traveling camera move when Mrs. Arizona discovers her missing son? And the movie has a similar ending (hazy dream of a child-filled future) to 25th Hour.

Haven’t seen Holly Hunter since The Incredibles (and haven’t seen her since O Brother). Her last movie before starring in this was Swing Shift. Tex Cobb (Police Academy 4) is the Lone Biker, a bounty hunter seemingly summoned by Cage’s nightmares. Sam McMurray (a cop in C.H.U.D.) is Cage’s boss who gets punched (and thus fires Cage) for suggesting a wife-swap, then schemes to steal the stolen tyke for wife Frances McDormand. John Goodman and William Forsythe (of the Steve Gutterberg version of The Man Who Wasn’t There) are brothers who break out of prison (then in the epilogue, back into prison) assuming Cage will join them on some heists. And Trey Wilson (a baddie in Twins who died soon after) is Nathan Arizona, father of the quints, who proves to be a decent fellow at the end.