by ·Comments Off on Auteur Shorts watched mid-2011

Plastic Bag (2009, Ramin Bahrani)

An American Beauty plastic bag, dancing with me for twenty minutes. Only this bag’s journey is very well filmed and the bag has the voice of Werner Herzog – two innovations that would have greatly helped the last plastic bag movie I saw, The Green Bag. A blatant environmentalism screed, but I really enjoyed it. I thought it’d have the same ending as Children of Men, but it had the same ending as AI: Artificial Intelligence instead.

The Dirk Diggler Story (1988, PT Anderson)

An actual fake doc, but not a polished one. I thought it was rigged to look amateurish until I read online that it was actually edited on two VCRs by young Anderson. Narrated by PT’s father Ernie Anderson, a big-time TV announcer. It’s nice that he was willing to participate in his 18-year-old son’s movie about pornography, homosexuality and drug addiction. The most fun part of the movie is hearing this straightlaced announcer pronounce titles like “White Sandy Bitches” and “Bone To Be Wild”.

Dirk is explicitly bisexual in this one, but otherwise it hits some familiar plot points from Boogie Nights: Dirk’s drug addiction, his ill-advised recording career, his buddy Reed. There’s less nudity in the short, and it ends with an on-set fatal overdose for Dirk. My favorite bit that didn’t make the feature was a group prayer for God to protect us against premature ejaculation.

Horner (Burt’s character) is played by The Colonel in Boogie Nights, the only actor who returned. Well, Michael “Diggler” Stein had a cameo as “stereo customer”. He turned writer/director after that – his last film starred Andy Dick and Coolio.

Las Hurdes/Land Without Bread (1933, Luis Buñuel)

A half-hour documentary that has been discussed to death – how much of it is real? Can it be considered surrealist? Etc. Taken at face value as a portrait of an extremely poor mountain community, it’s well made, interesting, and too vibrant (and even humorous) to blend in with your average educational short. I still can’t believe they had a donkey killed by bees, and shot a mountain goat then hurled its body off a cliff, all to make points about the difficulty of life in this place. At least they didn’t kill any people on camera, although the narrator may have exaggerated (or undersold, who knows?) their conditions. Was released in ’33, had a French voiceover added in ’35 then a newsreel-toned English voiceover in ’37 – I saw the French version. I assume the bombastic music was on all three versions.

Senses of Cinema calls it “a documentary that posits the impossibility of the documentary, placing the viewer in the uneasy situation of complicity with a cruel camera probing the miseries of the urdanos for our benefit.”

The Old Lady and the Pigeons (1998, Sylvain Chomet)

This 20-minute movie gives me inexpressible joy. It’s a good antidote to the world-weary realism of The Illusionist, back way past the anything-goes surrealism of Triplets of Belleville into a pure comic cartoon world. A starving policeman dresses as a pigeon, barges into a bird-feeding old woman’s house and demands a meal, then does the same all year until she tries to eat him for Christmas dinner. Full of delightful little details (and at least one sad bird death).

The Italian Machine (1976, David Cronenberg)

“Let’s figure it out, Gestapo-style.”
A series of betrayals leading to an obsessed mechanic gaining ownership over a unique motorcycle. Made for TV, so people call each other “meathead” and “turkey”.

Beardy Lionel (Gary McKeehan of The Brood) hears that a collector’s-item motorcycle is in the hands of a collector. This will not stand, so he grabs his buddies (Frank Moore, second-billed in Rabid, and Hardee Lineham who had a cameo in The Dead Zone) and heads over posing as reporters to figure out how to free the bike from the boring rich guy (played by Guy Maddin’s buddy Louis Negin). Lionel sucks at pretending, though, so they’d be screwed if not for Ricardo, a dull cokehead hanger-on at Negin’s house who helps them out. Cronie’s fascination with automotive machinery peaked early with this and Fast Company, then came back with a brief vengeance with Crash.

Our beardy hero first meets Louis Negin:

Bottle Rocket (1992, Wes Anderson)

Cute sketch, with the Wilson brothers and Bob from the Bottle Rocket feature, plus the gun demo scene shot exactly the same way (just in black and white). They’re budding criminals, robbing Luke’s house then a book/video store, taking one guy’s wallet. No Inez, Futureman, Kumar or James Caan.

Something Happened (1987, Roy Andersson)

An AIDS lesson with didactic narration, illustrated with Andersson’s expertly composed setups of depressed-looking white people. One particular pale balding guy is seen a few times. It ends up less depressing than World of Glory, at least. Commissioned as an educational short but cancelled for being too dark

Within The Woods (1978, Sam Raimi)

Ah, the ol’ Indian burial ground. “Don’t worry about it,” says Bruce Campbell, “You’re only cursed by the evil spirits if you violate the graves of the dead. We’re just gonna be eating hot dogs.” Then he immediately violates a grave of the dead. Nice test run for The Evil Dead, with many elements already in place, like the the famous monster’s-pov long running shot, girls being attacked by trees, evil lurking in the cellar, knifing your friend as he walks in the door because you thought he was a demon, and of course, “JOIN US”. Hard to make out the finer points of the film since this was the grossest, fuzziest, lowest-ass-quality bootleg video I’ve ever seen.

Clockwork (1978, Sam Raimi)

Woman at home is stalked by jittery creeper (Scott Spiegel, director of From Dusk Till Dawn 2). He sticks his hands through her crepe-paper bedroom door, stabs her to death, but she stabs him back, also to death. It’s not much in the way of a story, but Raimi already has a good grip on the editing and camera skills for making decent horror. How did 19-year-old Raimi get his lead actress to take her clothes off in his 8mm movie?

Sonata For Hitler (1979, Aleksandr Sokurov)

Music video of stock footage from pre-WWII Germany stuck inside a ragged-edged frame surrounded by numbers and sprocket holes. Halfway through, the music mostly fades away, replaced with foreboding sound effects.

Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers (2001, Simonsson & Nilsson)

Drummers break into an apartment, play catchy beats in the kitchen and bathroom, with a slow bedroom number in between, then a destructive romp through the living room. But just as they finish, the inhabitants return. Clever and fun, and just the thing that probably should not have been extended into a two-hour feature.

by ·Comments Off on La Region Centrale (1971, Michael Snow)

I can tell this is a film that should be seen in a theater, no, that needs to be seen in a theater. It has no story, but unlike a Brakhage film which you may want to study at home and watch over and over, this is meant as an experience, more a ride than a movie. So I’ve done the movie great harm by watching it on my laptop, a reproduction of a reproduction of a TV screening, all low resolution with the corner of the image defaced by a station logo. One could already convincingly argue that I haven’t seen La Region Centrale at all, under those conditions – but wait, it gets worse. The experience builds (probably) over its three-hour running time, becomes (probably) more mesmerising and abstract as the third hour wears on. But I kept putting it on after midnight then falling asleep watching it, continuing the next night, as if picking up the story where I’d left off. And wait, there’s more. I thought for sure I could handle the last 45 minutes at a time without falling asleep again (wrong, lasted 35) but I soon got tired of the constant whirring sound effects (conforming to the strict rule that avant-garde films need always have annoying soundtracks) so I muted the movie and put on the latest Mogwai album instead.

All these crimes I committed against the movie, but I still liked it quite a lot, certainly better than Wavelength. Most of the Michael Snow movies I’ve been able to see have been interesting, but also more fun than tedious (again, all but Wavelength) which is exceptional in the avant-garde scene.

The writeup at Shooting Down Pictures is better than anything I could come up with:

Arguably the first feature filmed by a robot, Michael Snow’s three hour exploration of the possibilities of camera movement over a barren Arctic landscape suggests many things: sci-fi space probe footage more authentic than George Lucas; a rebuff to the romantic frontier landscapes of Hollywood Westerns; an avant-garde equivalent of an amusement park simulator ride. Lensed by a specially designed rotating camera mount pre-programmed to move with stunning variety, the film begins as a slow, soothing meditation on the otherworldly textures of the Canadian wilderness, but gradually morphs into a dizzying, terrifying freakout, a relentlessly spinning gaze that pummels the equilibrium of the human eye. The film pushes the boundaries not only of human sight but of the physical earth, destroying gravity and transforming a lifeless vista into a cosmic force of light and energy. Clinically scientific in its approach yet yielding an organic, even spiritual wonder, La region centrale does not merely vindicate the oft-neglected genre of experimental film, but thrusts itself into the center of cinema at its most vital.

My favorite motion is twenty minutes before the film’s end, the camera rotating while turning, but not in synch with each other, making the landscape look small and spherical but ever-changing.

Michael Snow:

The film will become a kind of absolute record of a piece of wilderness. Eventually the effect of the mechanized movement will be what I imagine the first rigorous filming of the moon surface. But this will feel like a record of the last wilderness on earth, a film to be taken into outer space as a souvenir of what nature once was. I want to convey a feeling of absolute aloneness, a kind of Goodbye to Earth which I believe we are living through. … It will preserve what will increasingly become an extreme rarity: wilderness. Perhaps aloneness will also become a rarity. At any rate the film will create a very special state of mind, and while I believe that it will have no precedent I also believe it will be possible for it to have a large audience.

by ·Comments Off on Deep Red (1975, Dario Argento)

Two awful thoughts: I wish I’d watched the English dubbed version since the Italian was so badly dubbed anyway, and I wish I’d seen the U.S. edit that chopped out twenty minutes. Or perhaps I wish I wouldn’t continue to waste my time on Italian horror movies in the first place. The few I’ve loved (Suspiria, City of the Living Dead) have been dampered by the many I’ve just hated to death. This wasn’t even a proper horror, just a “giallo” (which is not its own genre, people, just the Italian word for pulp crime fiction).

Opens with a psychic named Helga (Macha Méril of A Married Woman and Night Train Murders) giving her presentation to a sparse audience. “Butterflies, termites, zebras, all these animals and many more, use telepathy to transmit orders and relay information. This is a proven fact that can easily be demonstrated.” She will soon be knifed to death then hung out her jagged broken glass window for Marc (David Hemmings, star of Blow-Up) to come attempt to rescue. It’d be ten years before Argento would change his mind, making a film (Phenomena) with a woman who speaks telepathically to butterflies and termites its star, instead of its first victim.

Marc appoints himself lead detective on the case, even though he’s a jazz musician who barely knew the victim. The actual detective is a jerk anyway. Marc meets a sprightly young reporter (Daria Nicolodi, who had cats flung at her in Inferno) who will be his partner in investigation – and in love. They discuss gender equality (I didn’t know there was such thing in Italy), which leads to an arm wrestling match. DH also tries confiding in his best friend in jazz, Carlo, but Carlo is always too drunk to help.

Daria:

Next some woman named Elvira is killed (along with her pet bird, and I HOPE that wasn’t a real bird, damn animal-brutalizing Italians) – an author who wrote a book on something or other, I dunno. It doesn’t matter. Hot on the case, Hemmings looks for Carlo but instead finds his weird mom (Clara Calamai, star of Ossessione) who sends him to Carlo’s boyfriend’s house. Once we know Carlo is gay, and this being the 1970’s, it’s assumed he’s the killer (he’s not – it’s his mom).

This is how Carlo’s mom dresses in her own house:

Some professor is killed, I dunno, and Marc becomes obsessed with this spooky house with a child’s drawing on an inside wall and a walled-off secret room with a body inside. It’s Carlo’s old house – enter stylish flashback of Carlo’s mom knifing his dad to death. Before we learn about the mom, Carlo is suspected, gets dragged to death by a garbage truck (but Gabriele Lavia will return as Carlo in Inferno). Mom is beheaded when her necklace is caught in an elevator, heh. And at least one other animal (lizard with a pin through it) is tortured for the sake of this movie.

This is supposed to be a slasher but there are only two killings in the first ninety minutes. I don’t need a movie to give me continual bloody mayhem, but this has little going for it storywise besides the mayhem, mostly alternates overlong conversations with everlasting suspense scenes. I loved the keyboardy Goblin soundtrack, but did not like the dialogue editing. I’ll stop commenting that the voices are annoyingly out of sync when the Italians learn how to shoot sound film properly.

by ·Comments Off on The Traveler (1974, Abbas Kiarostami)

Qassem is always late for school, never does his homework, slacks off to play soccer. Things get out of hand when he decides to attend a big game in Tehran (about four hours northeast of his town – thanks, google maps). He steals money from his mother, borrows a non-working camera from his friend and scams every kid at school, claiming to be taking their portraits, then sells his soccer gear and hits the city.

Once there, he has to buy a ticket from scalpers, but he gets into the stadium. Realizing the game won’t start for hours, he goes walking in the city, finds a grassy spot and takes a nap. He dreams of getting caught cheating at school, of all the kids in town ganging up and beating his ass. Wakes up at dusk, having slept through the game – last shot is him running through the empty stadium.

You can almost hear the narrator from Two Solutions to One Problem asking us whether Qassem deserved to see the game. The movie puts some fun hidden commentaries on Qassem’s state of mind in his schoolwork – another kid reciting a story in class might as well be narrating Qassem’s daydreams (“Kuzat had just one thought: to escape with all his might”), and a vocabulary drill hits on “outlaw, discipline, ambition,” and on the final word he gets inspired to sell his soccer goals for the last bit of money he needs to make his trip.

Criterion calls this Kiarostami’s first feature – it’s 74 minutes, while Experience the previous year was 60 – but Senses of Cinema calls them both “short features.” Semantics! It’s funny that SoC talks of Kiarostami leading the Iranian New Wave, since I couldn’t stop thinking of The 400 Blows during this movie.

Qassem with his parents:

Also watched some early shorts…

Breaktime / In Between Class (1972)

More elliptical story than Bread and Alley or Two Solutions for One Problem. Dara kicks a ball through a window at school, gets punished. He kicks another kid’s ball out of play, escapes punishment. Then he goes for a walk to the highway. There must be something I missed. Sharply photographed, with some tricks you don’t see much in Kiarostami films: a moving crane shot and a slow-motion effect. No dialogue except for the written intro.

The Chorus (1982)

Oh my god, this one is my favorite. Opens with guy in a horse cart galloping through the alleys, but our hero is the old man with a hearing aid who slows him down. Good to see that even in Iran a favorite past time of elderly men is throwing crumbs to flocks of pigeons. Our guy goes home and removes his hearing aid due to obnoxious road work outside, then can’t hear when his granddaughter is at the door. More and more kids gather outside to help her shout to be let in, until finally he looks out the window.

by ·Comments Off on Dream Castle/Sleeping Beauty (1973, James B. Harris)

“If you wake a sleeping beauty, you run the risk of being awakened yourself”

Robert is a melancholy cipher who lives in a mansion with two women, who seem alternately to be his maid, his landlady, his lover. At a carnival he sees an exhibit where a sleeping young woman is on display. You can pay her slimy keeper (who is not too good with his spiel, despite years of practice), a dollar to see her, another dollar to kiss her, and an undisclosed sum for something more after hours. Robert (also called Troy, who knows why) pays $20,000 to keep her and bring her home, another white person to float identity-free in the mansion, like The Dreamers with less explicit sex (but some serious nudity in one cheerleading scene towards the end).

Strangely enough, I was looking for a different movie about mysteriously empty-headed white people in a large house when I found this one. Eduardo de Gregorio, a co-writer of Celine and Julie Go Boating, reunited some of that film’s cast for his companion piece, set within the fiction house but without Rivette’s two interlopers. It’s called Surreal Estate, and I remembered it’s from the mid-70’s, so when I saw “Dream Castle (1973)” I assumed I was watching the Gregorio movie with a different title translation… then almost turned it off when I realized my mistake… until Richard Pryor’s name appeared in the credits.

Our hero Troy leaves the house sometimes to play sax at a bar (presumably not an influence on the split-identity sax-blowing Bill Pullman of Lost Highway) and hang out with his friend Pryor. So, Pryor is our connection to the outside world, but not to “reality,” exactly, because there is something wrong with him. He is either mental or drunk, or just trying to play his scenes way too energetically to make up for the langour around him. I appreciate it, but the movie won’t let him get away with this, and finally kills him (he coughed once, an hour earlier, the movie’s old-fashioned idea of foreshadowing).

The Sleeping Beauty (Tisa Farrow, sister of Mia, later star of Zombie) gets acclimated in the house, but I’m never clear on the residents’ relationships, or even whether she ever finally hooks up with Robert/Troy (Zalman King, director of Wild Orchid and The Red Shoe Diaries). She’s not some fairy-tale symbol of purity – at one point making loud sex noises with Scarlett (Carol White, star of Poor Cow) to fool Troy (he only ends up looking vaguely depressed). Anyway there’s some pretending to enter her into a convent in the end, but finally Troy puts her back to sleep and goes on tour with the carnival, displaying her as the sleeping beauty.

Apparently I had this because it was on Rosenbaum’s top-thousand list under the title Some Call It Loving (my least favorite of its titles). Director James Harris was a producer on Kubrick’s early films, also made a Wesley Snipes actioner, a Richard Widmark/Sidney Poitier thriller and a couple of James Woods movies. The cinematographer’s biggest movie was probably Carrie.

Watched as an AVI file transferred from a VHS tape which was recorded over another program. When this movie got slow and quiet (which it did often) I’d hear that old, mostly-erased program whispering through the soundtrack and try to imagine what it might be. It might be my tape copy and not the original film, but the whole thing looks like a shabby TV movie – maybe on cable, which accounts for the porny vibe I get from the girls (speaking of which, have I mentioned the nude cheerleading performance at the end?).

I can’t say the actors are bad because I expect they’ve been asked to perform like blank robots. The movie has its own idea of poetic pacing, but without the talent of an Epstein or even a Rohmer to back it up. Overall not terrible, kept me guessing, anyway.

by ·Comments Off on The Marquise of O (1976, Eric Rohmer)

A strangely excellent movie – beautifully shot and performed. It’s very straightforward, plot-wise. The central mystery is set up in the first scene (taking place at Cafe Exposition, populated by extras filling each other in on backstory), and the movie spends the rest of its runtime dropping hints as to the solution to the central mystery, until finally even people like me, who don’t try to guess the endings to movies, know very well what’s going to happen. The NY Times considered it obvious enough to reveal the answer outright in their original review. But somehow that didn’t keep me from loving the movie, more than Perceval to be sure. One complaint: the title made Katy think of the Marquis de Sade, and made me think of The Story of O – so the movie should have been far sexier than it was.

The story was written in the early 1800’s and set in Germany, so of course Rohmer makes a German film that looks like it is happening in the early 1800’s, with a Barry Lyndon level of attention to light and costume. The Marquise (Edith Clever of a couple Hans-Jurgen Syberberg movies) is rescued from Russian marauders by their commander Bruno Ganz (not long before starring in Herzog’s Nosferatu). She is given sleeping pills after her ordeal, and the family is ever grateful to Ganz. Thing is, he’s now strangely, hurriedly insistent on marrying the Marquise, and she soon realizes she is pregnant.

Bruno makes an awesome entrance:

It becomes increasingly obvious to the viewer that Ganz knocked her up while she slept from the pills and is trying to run damage control, but this never occurs to the Marquise or her family until he admits it in the final scene. Instead, her mother tries to pin it on faithful servant Leopardo, while her father shuts his ears and bans her from setting foot in the house again.

Rohmer himself stands distractingly against the wall:

A super talky movie, of course, but possibly my favorite so far of Rohmer’s. Intertitles and fade outs at the end of scenes provide what little stylization is allowed into the movie. It’s funny to me that in the last line of the movie the marquise calls Bruno an angel – he and the actor playing her brother (Otto Sander) would later co-star as angels in Wings of Desire and Faraway So Close.

by ·Comments Off on Perceval Le Gallois (1979, Eric Rohmer)

I didn’t expect this from the most naturalistic of the French new wavers. It’s a period musical adaptation of an epic poem – that part seems up Rohmer’s alley – but he uses spare, symbolic sets (anticipating the digital backdrops of The Lady and the Duke) and has the actors read their character’s dialogue and accompanying narration, speaking along with their actions so as not to break up the verses. The source poem is incomplete, so the story trails off at the end, but not before a momentum-killing passion play with our lead character as Jesus on the cross. It’s quirky and unique, and I liked the story somewhat, but didn’t warm up to the simple lead character or the renaissance music. As far as French movies set in weirdly artificial castles starring Andre Dussolier go, I prefer La Vie est un roman.

Young Andre Dussolier with Perceval:

Perceval (Fabrice Luchini, who’d recently starred in Immoral Tales) takes advice given him VERY seriously, listening first to his mother, then a “worthy man” he meets on his travels. But he is dumb as hell, and sometimes misinterprets the intent of the advice, firstly when he barges into a knight’s tent, steals some food and molests the woman inside. I’m not sure what advice led to that. Later he’s told that it’s better to stay silent than say stupid stuff, so in the enchanted castle of the Fisher King, he doesn’t ask about the miraculous bleeding spear and glowing bowl he sees, and so is cursed for his lack of humility, and spends five years wandering godlessly through the wilderness while his mother dies alone back home. As with many ancient texts, the story takes logical leaps that I don’t follow.

Magic woman with awesome hair who delivers the Fisher King curse:

Perceval Christ:

Elsewhere, Perceval falls for a woman named Blanchefleur (Arielle Dombasle, who made an impression as the goofy wheelchair woman in La Belle Captive), defends her castle and promises to marry her. He gets respect from King Arthur and starts sending his defeated enemies to the King for punishment instead of finishing them off. Then the movie leaves Perceval for a long while, following Arthurian knight Gawain (Dussolier) on a quest to clear his name from some murderous accusation, with a stop on the way to win a jousting contest on behalf of a rich girl. I love that the same choir of musical servants (including Pascale Ogier of Le Pont du Nord, in her first role) appears in every location. I also love the look of the film, and a weird scene involving cartoon geese.

There’s Pascale on the right:

Perceval with Blanchefleur:

Rosenbaum:

a medieval musical that feels a bit like a western … The merit of Rohmer’s realism in Perceval is that it brings something otherwise dead and forgotten to life – not because Rohmer’s imagination is especially rich but because he sees no alternative to his literalism, even if it makes some audiences laugh in disbelief.

by ·Comments Off on For All Mankind (1989, Al Reinert)

Very nicely assembled space doc, a tribute to the Apollo missions. Some 16 years after we stopped going to the moon, Reinert montaged audio interviews and film records from the flights into a concise movie with some familiar imagery (still good to see it in well-restored HD) but plenty of new stuff for a space novice like myself.

Lots of anti-gravity play, and talk about music. I was impressed that one astronaut took the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack into space, forgetting that the film predated the first moon landing. And speaking of music, I liked the documentary’s music without paying much attention, didn’t realize until the end credits that it’s all by Brian Eno. Nor did it really occur to me until more than halfway through the short feature that multiple missions were being shuffled without comment. These are two things I’ll have to focus on next time. Turns out Reinert cowrote that Final Fantasy movie I hated, but I can’t hold that against him now.

T. Rafferty:

What he does in this project, editing millions of feet of film and hundreds of hours of audio recordings into an eighty-minute feature, is treat the whole Apollo adventure as a single, epic trip to the moon, peopled by a crew so anonymous that it seems to represent, well, all mankind. … [Nobody] is identified by name. The film simply proceeds, with serene inevitability, from one fiery liftoff to one gentle splashdown, not troubling itself to distinguish any individual mission from any other and never interrupting the hypnotic flow of otherworldly imagery with a shot of a talking head. At first, when one of the offscreen voices says something unusually poetic, or funny, you wonder whose voice it is, but after a while you stop wondering. It doesn’t seem to matter. It’s everybody’s voice.

Reinert:

I began interviewing the Apollo astronauts in 1976. They were mostly retired astronauts by then, changed men. Over the years I taped nearly 80 hours of interviews with those original extraterrestrial humans, and excerpts from the tapes constitute the major part of the soundtrack of For All Mankind. The movie thus speaks with the intimate voice of personal experience.
…
For All Mankind is the firsthand story of a great mythic adventure. Touching the Moon was by definition a work of inspired imagination and high art, and scarcely requires further embellishment. It speaks for itself more eloquently than it can ever be interpreted: an age-old dream that at long last was fulfilled.

Rafferty again:

It takes enormous daring to make an avant-garde movie about people as determinedly square as the scientists, technicians, and pilots of the Apollo team; where this journalist, who had never directed a movie before, found the inspiration for that unlikely project is—like so much in the film—unfathomable. … In the late nineties, HBO aired a twelve-part docudrama series called From the Earth to the Moon, to which Reinert contributed two scripts. (The series is less exciting than it should have been—it tries too hard to be stirring—but its history is pretty reliable.) Reinert also had a hand in writing Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, which effectively (if, again, a bit too strenuously) dramatizes the 1970 mission … But For All Mankind is irreplaceable: one of a kind and likely to remain so. It is, formally, among the most radical American films of the past quarter century and, emotionally, among the most powerfully affecting.

by ·Comments Off on Hanzo The Razor: Sword of Justice (1972, Kenji Misumi)

Apparently the dirty, ugly unpleasantness of American 70’s cinema made it to Japan. This is basically Shaft as a samurai flick, more icky and less funny than Black Dynamite.

Why did I watch this? One summer at the beach I read an article by Jonathan Rosenbaum about Japanese filmmaker Yasuzo Masumura. I was impressed that so many essential films were made by someone I’d never heard of, so I sought them out when I got home – enjoyed his Afraid to Die and Blind Beast but I didn’t try very hard to find more, got distracted by other things, until I saw his name on this box set of filthy samurai cop films. Years later I am finally watching the first in the trilogy, which is not by Masumura but Kenji Misumi, director of some Zatoichi and Lone Wolf & Cub movies. So this is a bad movie watched in preparation for a bad sequel by a recommended director. Auteurism at work.

Hanzo is played by Zatoichi himself, Shintarô Katsu, also of The Loyal 47 Ronin. The 40-year-old actor’s speed and agility are unimpressive, but he can put on spiked metal knuckles and punch a dude’s eyes out. Hanzo’s main weapon is his cock (“You’re so virile,” exclaims a witness he is raping). Hanzo is so good that the girls give up information not when he threatens to rape them, but when he threatens to STOP raping them. And yes, it’s “them,” because the movie ran out of ideas so it used that one two or three times.

The uncorruptible Hanzo takes on his corrupt boss (Kô Nishimura), the escaped Killer Kanbei, and some sad little girl’s dad who is dying from stomach cancer. In the end, having wreaked some major vengeance upon the criminal justice system and raped every woman in sight (because females don’t deserve justice), he hangs the dad, then his theme song plays and it’s over.

I liked some of the stylish transitions and split-screen and backdrops anyway. IMDB isn’t being cooperative with character names, so I’m not sure exactly who fought whom or who got raped when, but I’m sure all lingering questions will be answered in the sequel.