Hardworking family lives on hostile island with no water, so they ferry buckets across the sea from the next island. Life just sucks, is hard and unforgiving, then their oldest son dies, but they have to keep going to survive. Beautiful looking movie with really good music, flutey themes that the Criterion calls “modernist,” so I am sure I don’t know what that word means. The first non-ghost story I’ve seen by Shindo, although the Criterion essay calls it a ghost tale out of habit.
Kalat says this was the sixth Mabuse movie, a combination sequel and remake. It has some typical sequel behavior, taking its villain backstory too far by explaining that brain abnormalities cause his evil power. Other than this, it’s a pretty good movie, much better than the 60’s Fantômas update.
Inspector Gert Fröbe (fresh off Fritz Lang’s own 1960 Mabuse movie) knows only one criminal mind could be behind a counterfeiting ring, but Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss, also from the Lang) is secured in an asylum, so he visits the place and discovers that a doctor (the prolific Walter Rilla, who started out with Murnau’s Finances of the Grand Duke) is being hypnotized into passing along the mastermind’s messages. Corrupt cop Flocke tries to atone by getting into Mabuse’s gang, but is killed… Boxer Johnny joins the gang then finds he and his girl are trapped… the doctor apparently survives to appear in the next two movies.
Harmless Mabuse scribbles away while Gert reviews his notes and the bowtie doctor observes:
Trapped boxer:
Mind-controlled doctor takes a drive:
Maybe they really don’t make ’em like this anymore. Watched on a whim, dunno Michael Ritchie (two Fletch movies and Prime Cut) and this isn’t about anything of interest (Robert Redford is a hotshot replacement skier on the US olympic team coached by Gene Hackman), but visually it’s really well put together. Maybe not the undercranked-looking wide shots of ski races, but everywhere else the editing and movement is very alive. Redford likes a girl, of course: Swedish Camilla Sparv (of The Trouble with Angels), who is working for a ski manufacturer, and of course he has rivalries with his teammates, including good dude Jim McMullan (of a couple Joel Schumacher movies), who gets laid up and misses the olympics. Not running out and recommending this as an example of Pure Cinema, but more watchable than a late 60’s New Hollywood sports movie has any business being.
What skiing leads to:
At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964, José Mojica Marins)
Opens with a woman talking to the audience, Elvira-style, then the screaming sfx over the opening titles make it feel like this is gonna be a campy carnival ride of a movie. It’s not really, despite the TV Batman scene transitions, must just be José “Coffin Joe” Marins having as much fun in the editing room as he appears to be having in the lead acting role. The dubbing (and everything else) isn’t technically great, but it’s an honestly eccentric movie, up there with Death Bed on the pile of horrors with justifiable cult reputations.
Joe/Ze is the most feared man in town since he has no faith, and no compunction about violence and murder. He’s also a rude, shitty guy – at the beginning his woman tells him something, he replies “you have talked enough,” and walks out. He goes to the bar, cuts off a guy’s hand, whips another guy terribly, then returns home and kills his wife with a tarantula, then a second later he’s getting all moral on a random man. Seeking an heir, he kills his friend and rapes her girl, but she commits suicide – then the doctor wants to investigate the friend’s death, so Ze pokes out his eyes and sets him on fire.
After dude has been so terrible you’d think the last ten minutes of him screaming and running from vengeful ghosts would be more rewarding, but that fact that he lives to appear in a sequel gives the impression that Marins wasn’t serious about the comeuppance, he just enjoyed being bad for ninety minutes. Even on my standard old DVD, the avenging ghost’s stop-motion granite aura looked rad.
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The Unliving (2010, Hugo Lilja)
I had some extra time, checked out a nice HD copy of this half-hour Swedish short. Nice twist on the ol’ zombie apocalypse. Mark and Katrin are in love – he installs wiring in zombie brains turning them into docile workers, she goes on raids into the city and nailguns zombies to walls so they can be captured and brought to Mark’s lab. They’ve each got problems – she kills a coworker who gets bitten, which is against the rules – and he spots his own mom and brings her home instead of drilling her brains, which is definitely against the rules. I assume their bosses are corrupt and there’s a whole gov’t conspiracy going on and this would’ve been expanded had they ended up making a feature version, which it feels like this very much wants to be… I kept stopping myself from being impressed with the massive amount of work put into this short because it ends up feeling like an overpriced advertisement for something, or an extended trailer for a miniseries. Or maybe I’m just cynical – it has some good character bits, like Katrin coming home, seeing her partner’s zombie mom, and stress-eating cereal. The director and writer finally got their break into features with 2018’s space adventure Aniara.
Greaves and his crew film in the park (they have permits!) a couple of actors performing a trite scene – but they’re also filming themselves filming these things, and filming the director trying to work things out, and filming the crew voicing their concerns about the scene and the director. It’s an exciting concept, hampered by the small problem of being no fun to watch.
I suppose these are professionals, not hippies, but it’s still 1968 and listening to them talk invites dark flashbacks of Lions Love. And the editing of individual scenes is nice but the overall structure seems slack and random – I want to have examples, but Criterion Channel is mad that I’ve got an external monitor attached, so it’s not letting me review.
This is aka La Residencia, but I already have enough horror movies with generic titles like House, so I appreciate the English version. All these movies that have big music and lazy credits as some fancy people arrive at a large house by carriage, I never think they’re gonna be good. This one was… alright. You’re not even sure it’s a horror movie until, as in Halloween, all the bodies are discovered in the final five minutes.
Before that it’s a boarding school drama, with a stern headmistress, a new girl, a bitchy kissup girl, a couple suspicious employees – and the principal’s son who hides in the walls and cuts up the girls for parts. The movie is Spanish, set in France, spoken in English. I was surprised the movie killed the new girl – a couple of the deaths were fun, including Isabelle’s slow-mo stabbing in the garden.
L-R: defiant girl, strict principal, kissup girl
The director died just last year, also made the acclaimed horror Who Can Kill a Child? Principal Lilli Palmer was in The Boys From Brazil. New girl Cristina Galbó went on to Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. The boy in the walls starred in Deep End.
Isabelle with the boy in the walls:
Timid Sasha gets up, runs through a brutal hierarchy of shithead children, through all the mirrors and reflections on water that young Tarkovsky can muster, attends a disappointing violin lesson, then things are looking up when he befriends a steamroller driver from the courtyard.
I figure the kid’s gonna get beaten up at some point, and he does, so the real tension is from wondering what will happen to the violin. Will it survive, will the shithead kids destroy or deface it, or will they break Sasha’s spirit so he destroys it himself, a la young Jodorowsky in Endless Poetry? Well it’s the first one, but there’s a scene when he’s run off to watch buildings get demolished with his steamrolling buddy and the shitheads find the violin left behind, then it’s untouched when Sasha returns, so I’d like to think there’s more to that story and it got cut for time. Remarkable little movie, with beautiful color on the blu-ray.
“Cops are pigs / cops eat shit!” You know when your cynical movie opens with a couple of news guys chancing upon a car wreck and filming the dying victims before bothering to call an ambulance, the movie’s gonna end with the death of a main character and the camera looking back at us, accusingly.
Pausing to get a beer halfway in, I looked up the female lead Verna Bloom (paper-mache artist in After Hours, Mary in Last Temptation of Christ) and realized our lead is Robert Forster – I had no idea, never seen him young before. Forster wheels around town with his soundman (Peter Bonerz of Catch-22, later director of Police Academy 6: City Under Siege) in the lead-up to the ill-fated Democratic National Convention. They follow a kid home and Forster falls for his mom Eileen (Verna).
Robert and Verna enjoying some TV:
The movie has character to burn. Playful editing, very mobile camera, and full of Zappa songs. A black community confronts the white camera crew about exploitation in the media, the morals of Mondo Cane are discussed, and in a movie (/city/year) where police are the villains, the reporters discover that their TV bosses have been letting cops study their raw footage. After Forster is fired, and before he’s hired by someone else to cover the convention, he seems like a calm and okay guy, just a good dude who loves shooting film and hanging out with Eileen and her pigeon-loving son Harold – so it’s the profession that’s sick, not him personally.
This would’ve been a vaguely-memorable late’60’s anti-establishment movie, but for the ending. Harold goes missing, Forster’s at the convention, so Eileen walks the city wearing a bright yellow dress in the midst of the real police riots – some of the most intense location shooting I’ve seen.
Wexler shot everything from Burt Reynolds’ film debut in 1961 to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Conversation, to Hal Ashby and John Sayles movies, to concert docs and a Zappa video.
There’s shooting and there’s shooting:
Thomas Beard for Criterion on the movie’s True/Falsey nature:
Wexler has had a kind of double life as an artist, known both for his poetic reportage and for his role as a studio craftsman, and his bifurcated career is mirrored in the dual nature of Medium Cool … To watch a fiction film and subordinate its plot and characterizations to the documentary value of the world it depicts, or, alternatively, to watch a documentary and constantly question its veracity, is to read the work against the grain. Given the design of Medium Cool, a film that explicitly functions as both document and fantasy at once, to view it at all is to read it against the grain. It’s a movie whose very composition not only allows for but demands multiple kinds of perception and visual thinking; it preserves its own disorder.
As far as I could remember from watching the early Criterion disc in 1999, this was a short-ish movie about bell casting, so imagine my surprise discovering that it’s a long-ish episodic movie about a painter with an extended bell-casting sequence at the end. Not my favorite Tarkovsky – too Catholic, and I think we’re supposed to know something about 1400’s Russian art history going in, because otherwise there’s not much drama following around this painter who never paints anything.
Turns out I also remembered the intro – a man flying away on ropes and balloons – a soviet myth according to the commentary, of the first flight of man – followed by a shot of a horse rolling over. Andrei and fellow painter/monks Kiril and Danil take shelter in their travels and witness a profane jester being brutalized by the cops.
Danil, Andrei, Kiril:
Some years later, an elder painter named Theo invites Andrei to work with him, invoking jealousy from the other monks, particularly whiny bitch Kiril, who beats his dog in anger (the movie is not kind to animals in general). Andrei takes along his slacker assistant, gets into an escapade with some naked pagans, some people get blinded, then there’s a long section of war and torture because a prince and his brother are feuding, and I didn’t know the motivation for most of this until reading a plot summary later – I thought the point was “the 1400s were terrible, yet Andrei still managed to paint beautiful things”. At the end of this though, Andrei has quit painting, or even speaking. Funny to watch this movie about a painter not painting, the day after Devotion, which features writers not writing.
Theo and Andrei:
Painters, not painting, as usual:
The movie jumps forward a decade to the part I remember – a young bellmaker’s son is approached to cast a new bell for a church, by order of the prince, who will throw a party if they succeed and kill them all if they don’t. Young Boriska claims that his recently deceased father passed on the secrets of bellmaking, but actually the kid is making it up as he goes, publicly barking orders and commanding a hundred men, but privately sick with worry. Andrei and Kirill are hanging around while all this is happening, doing nothing helpful, and it ends with the triumphant ringing of the new bell, then a color slideshow of period icons.
Boriska:
