by ·Comments Off on The Beast To Die (1980, Toru Murakawa)

Date is a psycho criminal, played by Japan’s coolest man Yûsaku Matsuda, but in this movie’s world violence tends to be awkward and clumsy and nobody is cool. Date is already being tailed by beardy detective Hideo Murota (also beardy as the first doctor in Dogra Magra) when he comes across an aggrieved waiter with frizzy hair (Rikiya of Tampopo and Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter) and enlists him in a bank robbery plot.

Turns out Date is a shellshocked war photographer (always you lose points when you bring real war atrocity footage into your dumbass crime picture, let this be a warning), which is why he “walks like a dead man” and acts weird around his girl even though he’s supposedly a classical music fan and she’s a hot concert pianist. The shellshock doesn’t explain why he tells really long stories though. Having recently watched Heat, I’m gonna be comparing all cops and robbers movies to that – these guys are more intense than Kilmer and company, killing both their girls before/during the big heist.

Pre-game pep talk:

Detective with 30 seconds left to live:

by ·Comments Off on Project A (1983, Jackie Chan)

There’s a lotta plot here, but Jackie ends up working for his bar-brawl rival Yuen Biao (Rat/Weasel of Eastern Condors) and teaming up with gangster-gambler Sammo to fight corruption and then take on pirates. After a dumbass white admiral gets captured by dread pirate Lo (Dick Wei of Visa to Hell), Chan’s ex-coast-guarders go rogue, beat the shit out of a pirate collaborator to figure out how to contact them, and smuggle Sammo aboard in a barrel. When Chan goes through some gears then hangs from a clock tower, it’s hard to miss the classic silent comedy references, and since this is the week for great bicycle scenes, we get a chase where he beats up guys with a bike in ten different ways.

Jackie was just in Locarno:

I think back to when we made those films, and we had so many problems [on the set]. It would be raining terribly. Something serious not working. On Project A, we got seasick, the [scenes of the] pirates on the sea were so difficult to do… but we kept going, and no matter what, we finished the movie. Then when it came out it was a success, and 40 years later people are still watching it. That’s what I signed up for. You see so many movies, so many directors – and nobody remembers them today. But then a few movies, 100 years later, are still there. At some point, I said to myself: I want to make this kind of movie, no matter how difficult it will be. When I pass away, I want the next generations to say there’s Bruce Lee, there’s Chaplin, there’s Jackie Chan.

by ·Comments Off on Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988, Charlotte Zwerin)

Really good rock doc, because the talking heads feel like punctuations to the flow of music instead of vice-versa. Like most movies, it is 90 minutes long when it could be LP-length, but say la vee. A musician’s musician, impenetrable as a person, at least in the movies I’ve seen. I first heard him in another doc, his mouth wide open, playing technically-imperfect tunes, immediately striking, a true jazz weirdo. That movie’s archive footage was shot in 1969, this one’s in 1967, both released decades later.

Paul Grimstad for Criterion:

From the [1967] Blackwood footage, interspersed with other archival film, photographs, new interviews, and narration, Zwerin distilled an hour-and-a-half-long structure not all that different from a Monk composition: jumpy, elliptical, catchy, moving … As a counterpoint to the archival material, Zwerin shot new footage of pianists Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris (both Detroit natives, like Zwerin) playing through Monk tunes as four-hand duets. We see how much fun they’re having, how generous and congenial their sharing of the music is, and how a Monk song like “Well, You Needn’t” allows for endless elaboration without its melodic outline ever becoming blurred.

by ·Comments Off on Shanghai Blues (1984, Tsui Hark)

Tuba guy (Kenny Bee of some early Hou movies) barely meets short-haired Shu (Sylvia Chang of some early Edward Yang movies) under a bridge when the war started, now trying to meet her at war’s end as planned. They each get pickpocketed and rip off pedicab drivers, identities and intentions are mistaken, it works out.

An atrociously dubbed comedy. After buying the Once Upon a Time box set and watching some twenty Tsui Hark movies, it cracks me up that this is the one that’s universally loved by the letterboxders I follow. Them: “just pure joy and beauty at every turn” … “A work of pure balletic grace, and a reminder that Hong Kong’s romcoms are every bit as ahead of the pack as their action movies.” Only Dave Kehr makes sense: “Hark’s colors have the almost startling intensity of old Technicolor; combined with his stroboscopic cutting, they make the film seem to fizz and sparkle on the screen.”

Pure joy and beauty?

by ·Comments Off on Drowning By Numbers (1988, Peter Greenaway)

Joan, Juliet, and Joely (whom Greenaway probably stunt-cast based on their first names) each drown their husbands, and also the conspirator-turned-blackmailer coroner Captain Smith, while the captain’s doomed son helps the movie count to 100. Watched on the fourth of july (movie had fireworks).

by ·Comments Off on The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988, Philip Kaufman)

Lot of recent references to spa town in films: Road to Wellville, Cure for Wellness, Days, now this. In the late 1960s DDL meets Juliette Binoche on a business trip but he’s already with hat girl Lena Olin, wants to keep both girls and for everyone to be friends. He’s a professional surgeon and casual writer, Juliette’s getting into photography, and when the Soviets invade Prague, his story gets him in trouble, and her photos of street protests get a hundred protestors in trouble. They escape to Switzerland but Juliette returns and he follows her, arriving smugly principled to a fallen society, where he’s demoted from brain surgeon to general practitioner to window washer, until they decide to live the rest of their (few) days with a friendly pig farmer. Director and actors (esp. Lena) do their best to save the movie from its clunky script, which is somehow by Bunuel’s writer and also got an oscar nomination.

by ·Comments Off on Variety (1983, Bette Gordon)

Christy needs a job, finds one in the box office of a porno theater alongside Luis Guzman. Inspired by her new job, she starts writing dirty stories and reciting them to people. This all scares away her uptight boyfriend Will Patton (boyfriend #1 of Janet Planet), so she lets stalker-customer Louie take her out to a Yankees/Red Sox game. When he leaves abruptly she goes detective mode and follows him to a shady under-bridge deal. After a few days of this she tells Louie she’s been following him and to meet her on a corner. This seems like a dangerous move, but the movie ends with a street shot (the corner?) over some nice John Lurie music, so maybe it worked out. Some lovely scenes of a fish market at night, though I wish they wouldn’t pick up the fishes by their eyeballs, and the meditation handshake montage is great. Written by sometime-Mekon Kathy Acker.

by ·Comments Off on À Flor do Mar (1986, João César Monteiro)

“Life is made of mistakes.” A family has a big few days harboring a fugitive. I think people are calling it Ruizian because of the pirates, but it’s truly very euro-arthouse, and I dig it. Rivettian in a few ways: long takes, long movie, creaky furniture and a cat following its own direction. I knew nothing about Monteiro a couple months ago, and now I’ve seen Silvestre and all his movies have been newly-restored on blu-ray, and why not watch them all?

Laura (the prolific Laura Morante of The Son’s Room and Coeurs) had moved her kids to Italy after her husband died suddenly last summer, is back on the Portuguese coast to visit her sisters-in-law (older Oliveira regular Manuela de Freitas, younger Teresa Villaverde, better known as a director) when an American washes up on the beach, so she takes him home to hide out. He successfully lays low during searches from police and pirates, then leaves them alone. “We’ll have to learn how to use up the remaining unhappiness.”

I don’t know whether the guy was named after Conan the Barbarian writer Robert Jordan on purpose, or if Laura’s last name being Rossellini is meaningful, but Sara recites from Doomed Love (she appeared in the film eight years earlier), and their cat is named Silvestre.

The lead actors staring at Monteiro:

by ·Comments Off on City of Women (1980, Federico Fellini)

Mastroianni plays our director’s stand-in again. Following a hot woman off a train in the middle of nowhere, he stumbles into a hidden hotel hosting a theatrical feminist convention. The women drive him into the night in a crazed caravan until he’s rescued by a dude with plenty of weapons and dogs… sees a telekinetic performance… descends a giant slide while reminiscing about various hot chicks… then the women put him on trial for sexism, ho hum.

No part of this is realistic, all dream-logic. Does it play circus music whenever things get zany? Sure as hell it does. We love Marcello, and Fellini is good at filming beautiful people and things, but it’s a Petrov’s Flu situation.