by ·Comments Off on Salem’s Lot (1979, Tobe Hooper)

A TV movie that feels like a TV movie, except for a couple moments of the most nightmarish imagery which would stick in my head for the decade between when I first watched this until I guess Coppola’s Dracula.

But mostly it’s a TV movie, a version of Needful Things where everyone is fascinated with new shopkeeper James “Bigger Than Life” Mason, but he doesn’t sell anything and nothing happens, then eventually in the second half his Nosferatu boss arrives to kill everybody. First we’ve gotta spend a lot of time with writer Ben (played by a TV cop) fascinated with a house in town. “There’s a connection, I just know it,” says a fat cop about Ben and the house, but Ben already told us the connection, why don’t they ask him? Then there’s high schooler Mark (later of Enemy Mine) – they didn’t know about autism in 1979 but this kid loves monster movies and models and “keeps his feelings in hand.” In the end Ben and Mark will team up to defeat evil, two heroes with haircuts for which they both should be embarrassed.

Meanwhile we’ve got three hours to fill, so Ben finds himself a girl as soon as he gets into town (Bonnie Bedelia of Needful Things, haha), angering her dad Dr. Bill (head priest of Exorcist III) and her ex Ned, who punches Ben straight into the hospital. George Dzundza (Species II) is gonna murder realtor boss Fred Willard for cheating with his wife Julie Cobb (of a three-hour Brave New World), but lets Willard escape, to be instantly killed by yard monsters. Gravedigger Mike of Lawnmower Man gets bit (I saw him a couple days ago in a Rob Zombie movie), making his whitehair friend Lew Ayres (Omen II) sad.

Tobe (who would soon make Poltergeist) lingers on the writer thinking a house is evil, and maybe so, but I think it’s the foreign Nosferatu that is more evil here. It kills Ned at least, then our guys shoot James Mason to death (he’s not even a vampire), burn down the town, and leave the girl behind. I watched the sequel relatively recently, do not remember the Rob Lowe/Rutger Hauer remake, or the version last year that everyone hated.

And especially featuring Elisha Cook Jr. as the town drunk:

This movie is terrific at having characters stand next to their names

I don’t get the version of christianity where a popsicle stick crucifix can ward off evil

by ·Comments Off on 1975 Shorts

Firing Range aka Polygon (Anatoliy Petrov)

Professor’s son died in colonial wars, the prof invents an autonomous tank that can detect fear and sets it loose on his own army in revenge. Nice little sci-fi war drama, too bad about the grotesque rotoscoping. Not the Old Man and the Sea guy, this is a different Petrov, and okay it’s from 1977 not ’75, sometimes my dates are off.

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Great (Bob Godfrey)

Comic attack on the British empire, very good illustrations with Monty Python-style motion gives way to slightly more traditional animation full of newspaper-caricature characters, and settles into focus on Brunel, a builder of very large bridges and ships, with photographed segments and musical numbers. Not one of my favorite things, but I also believe there should be more farcical musical bio-pics of obscure historical figures. Won the oscar over Sisyphus and a Bafta over Caroline Leaf. A very naughty Brit, Bob is also known for Instant Sex and Kama Sutra Rides Again.

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Perspectives (Georges Schwizgebel)

Roughly drawn figures keep changing form and direction over nice colored backgrounds and oppressive piano music.

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Ventana (Claudio Caldini)

Thin rectangles flit past over some ambient music. Made me sleepy.

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Sincerity II (Stan Brakhage)

Playing with the dog in the yard, playing with the wife in bed. I thought my copy was faded and orange with exposure problems, but sometimes you’ll get a clear, balanced shot or a strong blue-green, so who knows. Sincerity was Stan’s multi-part “autobiography” composed of footage shot by himself and friends. With ten minutes left we start seeing Stan himself, and the editing goes haywire. Naked children, a family train vacation, some trick photography play with the kids, a visit to Canyon Cinema. Silent; I listened to the latest Mary Halvorson album since her group is playing Roulette tonight.

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The Seasons (Artavazd Peleshian)

Opens alarmingly with a man and a sheep going over a waterfall. Then the frame is taken over by clouds, then a mountain – maybe the title was mistranslated from The Elements. Cattle and sheep drive, men and horses getting a truck unstuck from rainy mud, a hay-sledding party, a sheep-sledding party. After all the hard work, everyone (even the sheep) get fancied up for the wedding of the man from the waterfall scene. No narration, but a couple of intertitles – postsync sound and nice orchestral score. Ah, this is Armenia, the title refers to the Vivaldi music, and it’s shot by The Color of Armenian Land director Vartanov.

by ·Comments Off on Que Hacer (1970, Ruiz & Landau & Serrano)

I’m up to the “Left and Revolutionary Cinema” chapter of the Vogel book. Creating a fictional scenario around a real election with pop-up folk songs by Country Joe & The Fish – a Chilean Medium Cool, but not really visually or narratively interesting. Suzanne leans communist, her friends lean militant, they ask for her help kidnapping Balding Martin who has been following her around, but the plot goes bad due to a dirty informant and people get shot by the police.

Suzanne and her doomed commie conspirator friend:

Nice to have the DVD interview with Landau, who’s the source of the “CHILL-y-un” pronunciation. He says it was semi-improvised from a written framework with doc footage added, admits stealing from Brecht and Godard, doesn’t mention Medium Cool, though Landau and Wexler would codirect a film in Chile the following year so surely that came up. Balding Martin starred in Beware! The Blob the same year, popped up in minor roles in Hollywood pictures, just about everyone else showed up in the very early (and very late) Ruiz films. If the wikis can be believed, this played Cannes Director’s Fortnight with Emitai, Land of Silence and Darkness, Oshima’s Dear Summer Sister, The Death of Maria Malibran, and Emperor Tomato Ketchup.

by ·Comments Off on The Big Mess (1971, Alexander Kluge)

Space explorers set out to find a home beyond the reach of monopolist capitalism – sounds serious, but the actors in the rebel mission’s crew are absolutely goofing around. Early on, their ship catches fire and they’re not sure whether to try to save it or to sell it for scrap.

Some good montage, and the lo-fi outer space effects are fun, but the actors reading from scripts with indifferent blocking is too much. I guess this is self-consciously bad, but it is bad. Raymond Gun-Virus speaks for us all: “Extra .5 star for the 100+ individually designed intertitles and a live-in-space performance by Amon Düül II.”

My first by film-philospher Kluge, falling somewhere in the middle of his features both chronologically and in popularity. I don’t know what his whole deal is yet, besides that his career spans from Lang’s latest works to our all-digital present, and Cornell calls him “the German Godard.” This movie’s janky space-travel aspect reminds me of Ga-Ga, which I loved – am I not supposed to be watching more of Szulkin’s weird sci-fi films instead of digging up new German nonsense?

Hark Bohm, Fassbinder regular and a doctor in Underground:

by ·Comments Off on Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (1975, Rainer Fassbinder)

Mother K receives a bit of bad news: her husband went to work and murderer-suicided his boss. She gathers the family (son Ernst and his wife Irm Hermann, dancer daughter Corinna), and their situation attracts reporter Jorg and a communist couple. Everyone involved exploits the tragedy in their own way, also a sharp movie about political fractures within families.

L-R: Mother K, son, Irm, bearer of bad news

Communists:

Mom is the lead from Fear Eats the Soul in another big role. Ernst (star of Fear of Fear the same year) and wife Irm Hermann get the hell out of there and return pregnant. Mom’s daughter Ingrid Caven (a Year with 13 Moons star and a Suspiria Remake teacher) shacks up with the reporter (the large-faced star of Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day) and finds a job in town playing off her family’s infamy. After the daughter leaves, mom calls up communists Peeping Tom and Petra von Kant, who were the last people to be nice to her, but she wants real action while they say things like “it’s a slow process / we can’t work miracles / we won’t forget you.” Falling in with increasingly radical groups, Mother K meets anarchist Horst (Matthias Fuchs of Decoder) whose plan is to bring guns to the newspaper and demand a retraction of the reporter’s sensationalist article. We get a couple of possible ways out of this: a bloody shootout via intertitle, then a happy fantasy where Mother K survives, is abandoned by everyone again, and meets a nice lonely man.

dancer, reporter:

by ·Comments Off on Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975, Francois Truffaut)

Obviously watched this in tribute to my own Adele H., but the two Adeles wouldn’t seem to have much in common.

Isabelle Adjani travels to Halifax from France during the American Civil War to stalk her ex Lt. Pinson (Withnail & I director Bruce Robinson), telling everyone different stories about who he is, lost in love with a loser gambler who doesn’t respect her at all. She takes to trying to ruin his life, bribery, hypnotism, hiding her belatedly-revealed identity as the daughter of Victor Hugo or using it as suits her needs, until she ends up getting rescued from her doomed quest and gets locked in an asylum for the next sixty years.

Reminded me of the Sternberg/Dietrich Morocco – before indie rock was invented people didn’t know how to process these feelings. Adjani is gorgeous, of course, and the movie often looks nice, but it doesn’t make a strong case for itself with the monotonous story and inelegant editing.

Dreaming of drowning:

Isabelle gone Barbados:

by ·Comments Off on A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness (1977, Seijun Suzuki)

Coming a decade after Suzuki’s exile from studio film directing, and not long before his awesome Taisho Trilogy, I wasn’t sure where this movie stood in Suzuki’s career and I’ve put off watching it due to the dour title. Turns out it’s a real hoot, a brightly colored golf/advertising/stalker melodrama.

Taisho star (and a drunk pimp in Ronin Gai) Yoshio Harada plays the shitty boyfriend of a not-top-rated golfer, who hires trainer Takagi (of a handful of Ozu films I haven’t seen) to turn her into a golf champion, but only so an agency can sign her to a modeling contract. She succeeds, and on her first ad shoot they put her in all brown with a fluffy wig – I’d think they don’t know what they’re doing, then again it’s the 1970s.

Golfer Y?ko Shiraki was only in one other film:

The hot new star moves into a custom house with her little brother, where the neighbors don’t accept her, except for Ky?ko Enami (she starred in a Lady Gambler film series) who is starstruck, until she feels wronged by the golfer and the shitty boyfriend and turns dangerous. In the end the golfer is fired from her modeling job and getting pimped out by her stalker, the boyfriend is arrested (by Jo Shishido!) and goes violently mad on a golf course, then the little brother kills both women and burns the house down, all in high wild style.

From the writers of Naked Rashomon, Karate Bear Fighter, and Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands, and the cinematographer of Female Teacher in Rope Hell. Japan is a source of neverending delight. The commentary promises to talk about “idols” in their culture, something that’s been bugging me since Perfect Blue, but I only listened to the first half hour.

by ·Comments Off on Trails / Barefoot (João César Monteiro)

Trails aka Paths (1978)

Some kind of montage of folk tales, fables, poetry, with some gratuitous nudity.

White-haired guy is a relentless storyteller. A good section where a guy is running side-quests for a sheep thief, followed by too many scenes where admittedly cool-looking people stand still and recite lines. One guy gets imprisoned by gunmen for setting their slave-labor free. I got very tired and spaced out, but we reached present day somehow. The main(?) characters are a young couple in love, of course, or maybe multiple couples, since at one point she’s stabbed and thrown into the sea, and later she and her baby get killed by werewolves. Whatever’s going on here, Monteiro sure knows how to frame a shot.

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He Goes Long Barefoot That Waits For Dead Men’s Shoes (1965)

Early short containing some of his later preoccupations (doomed couples, mirrors, Luis Miguel Cintra).

by ·Comments Off on Pink Floyd at Pompeii MCMLXXII (1972/74, Adrian Maben)

Live for no audience, the original pandemic livestream. The editing is out of control – there’s more picture-in-picture and rotoscoping than you would imagine, or desire. It’s lovely to see some pure uncut source material that inspired This Is Spinal Tap, the restoration is beautiful, and it all builds to the band’s improv blues song with a dog on guest vocals. Guess this was released as an hour-long concert film then they added 20 minutes of pre-Dark Side interview junk a year later, including a regrettable scene where Wright(?) gets defensive about the band running their technology and not vice-versa like some people say.