by ·Comments Off on Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988, Guy Maddin)

Cat tossing. Occasional sync dialogue. Pretty calm editing for Maddin. A variety of ancient crackling songs in different languages. Framing story is children being told the hospital’s history to distract them from their dying mother.

In quarantine from the epidemic, Einar is jealous of fellow patient Gunnar for his popularity with the hot nurses. Gunnar is a widower because he rejected his beloved Snjófridur on their wedding night when she revealed that she also had the epidemic, and so she promptly dropped dead. Now, due to their shared interest in fish bark cutting (scissoring pieces of tree bark into fishy shapes), Gunnar learns that Einar has defiled his dead wife and stolen her shears. G goes blind and starts stalking E like a vengeful ghost, and this leads to a weary showdown where they mutilate each others’ asses and faces. Maddin’s career of made-up histories starts off with a bang.

fish bark appreciation:

I belatedly realized the fish bark appreciation homage in Hundreds of Beavers:

by ·Comments Off on Life is a Dream (1986, Raoul Ruiz)

At a movie theater with birds flying around, a man talks with the police stationed behind the screen and with the Chileans in a club accessible through the ladies room. Not exactly an adaptation of the 1600’s Spanish play, but our man has used the play as a mnemonic device to memorize (then forget) the names of 15,000 Chilean revolutionaries, and the film apparently includes footage of Ruiz’s prior staging of the play. Life may be a dream, or a movie, as the man tries to re-remember the list of names while the story blends dreamily with the genre films playing at the timeless theater. Variations on themes and images I’ve seen before, and then there’s this:

Lesley Stern wrote about it, reprinted in Rouge.

Maybe too complex for me, but hopefully we’ll get a restoration some day and I can get lost in it again.

by ·Comments Off on Ishtar (1987, Elaine May)

I read Mad Magazine in the 1980s, I know this is the worst movie ever made, but what this post presupposes is… maybe it isn’t? At first I thought it’s a “bad movie” because the lead guys are playing cheesy songwriters, and people weren’t used to hearing “bad” music in a movie? Turns out it’s because behind-the-scenes drama, power struggles, and budget overruns made it a laughingstock before it even opened, a boring reason to pile on a movie.

Our guys are ditched by their girls (Tess Harper of No Country for Old Men, and Carol Kane) and take a deal to do shows in the titular city (country?), where they’re immediately accosted by spy Isabelle Adjani whose murdered boyfriend has hidden a treasure map. Beatty is helping her, while Hoffman is spying for CIA Charles Grodin. There’s an overly helpful local kid named Abdul, because it was 1987. Cute movie.

In Cinema Scope, Christoph Huber calls out the

brilliantly “believably bad” songs composed for the film by Paul Williams (whose work here rivals his inspired compositions for Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise, another long-underrated satiric dismantling of the entertainment business — though Ishtar in some ways one-ups it with its critical allegory of Hollywood colonialism via the fusion of entertainment and politics).

by ·Comments Off on Every Man For Himself (1980, Jean-Luc Godard)

“Paul Godard” (Jacques Dutronc of a couple Zulawski films) leaves his hotel and is offered anal sex by the valet, my second JLG movie in a row to address that topic. Then he’s making weird incest jokes with the soccer coach of his daughter (actually Alain Tanner’s daughter), and the movie will stay perverse until the end. After Numero Deux we’re back to scripted domestic dramas with lovely photography, though Amy Taubin ties these two together, “both films dealing with the failure of intimacy and with marriage as hell, particularly for women.”

Divided into sections, also following TV producer Nathalie Baye (a Truffaut regular) and prostitute Isabelle Huppert (who’d just starred in a Chabrol). Marguerite Duras is an offscreen presence in the beginning. The “Slow Motion” segment (this whole film was known as Slow Motion in England) is post-production slow-mo, sequential freeze-frames. At the end we get nice payoffs for Paul’s annoying behavior and the movie’s big disruptive music which had seemed to bother the characters, as he gets hit by a car (in slow motion, of course) then his daughter and ex walk past the musicians playing the movie’s soundtrack.

–
Scenario de Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979)

The rare making-of to come out before the feature, JLG explaining his intentions for the movie they hadn’t shot yet. He speaks of wishing to write vertically on a typewriter instead of horizontally. The two women move in opposite directions, Huppert in the direction of meaning, while the man tries to fly above it all… explains his philosophy of superimposition and dissolves, which I only half followed, and of slow motion which mostly makes sense. I wondered with his idea of the music being secretly diegetic if he’d seen Noroit and Duelle. Says he compared lighting notes with Wim Wenders, who I think was working on Hammett. He plans for a scene where Denise will go into a forest “and in the forest she’d run into Werner Herzog… who will introduce, with typical German madness, the world that lies behind things… Perhaps all this isn’t very clear.”

by ·Comments Off on The Real Presence (1984, Raoul Ruiz)

Rivettian by his own confession, it’s an AI universe-is-simulation all-is-theater sort of movie. Only an hour long, I intended it as another Ruiz double feature with Life is a Dream, but it was too heady and intense and I had to put on something more straightforward afterwards.

The traitor-foot blind man in my Three Crowns screenshots was the star here, playing an actor who sees himself on video saying things he never said. Timely – Q: “Does this mean we will never get paid for the scenes we filmed where our real presence could be reasonably put to doubt?” – A: “If we paid you, we would have to admit the real existence of possible worlds.” He talks to the programmer (who is creating photorealistic AI on an Apple II), then visits another actor to discuss the situation, then attempts suicide. Then we fall into a vortex of different realities, confusing characters, acting/theater metaphors and layers. “He understands that the dream that was haunting him for years was only a theatrical performance.”

by ·Comments Off on Chameleon Street (1989, Wendell B. Harris Jr.)

Our guy (played by the director) has a new wife Gabrielle, is tired of working for his dad installing burglar alarms, so he pretends to work for Time to interview a basketball star, figuring if he can sell the interview to Time afterwards then he basically told the truth. Less justifiable is hanging out in a hospital doing real surgeries with no training. He spends some time in prison for that one, then escapes. “That afternoon I went to Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast to get my mind right,” hell yeah. He identity-thieves his way into Yale, calls himself Pepe le Mofo, sees a band called Fantomas Judex, has a grand time while his pregnant wife is left forgotten at home. I’m not clear how they both end up at the same masquerade, but after they win best costume he goes back to the family, donating blood to get by. Suddenly he’s a fake lawyer, meeting the mayor, a promising young political volunteer, until the cops arrive because his wife sold him out.

Harris is narrating much of the time. Lines repeat, characters talk into camera, reminded me of Story of a Three-Day Pass. Terrific end credits scene, the frog/scorpion story told by an array of readers fast-cut together. Won a Sundance grand prize (over Metropolitan, To Sleep With Anger, The Unbelievable Truth, The Plot Against Harry), and feels at times very much like a 1990 Sundance movie. Based on the life of a real guy who, per a delightful Film Stage interview with the director, hated the movie but appreciated the residual checks he got from it.

by ·Comments Off on Melvin and Howard (1980, Jonathan Demme)

Melvin is Puppet Master star Paul Le Mat, gives a ride to injured Howard (Jason Robards of A Boy and His Dog, made up to look like John Huston’s ghost). But Melvin’s a fuckup, and the bulk of the story is his getting left by wife Mary Steenburgen, getting back together with her, and getting left again. So it’s not surprising that he later mishandles the late Howard’s handwritten will, resulting in him never getting his share. The real Melvin lived almost 40 years after the movie came out, so hopefully he at least enjoyed his biopic fame.

by ·Comments Off on Paris, Texas (1984, Wim Wenders)

I remembered Red Hat Harry walking though the desert in the opening minutes, and the climax where he talks to estranged wife Nastassja Kinski through the one-way glass, but not the entire hour of movie in between. His brother Dean Stockwell has been raising the estranged couple’s son with wife Aurore Clément (a regular Akerman star) after both parents disappeared. Harry is mute and keeps walking out of situations, even gets kicked off a flight, but Dean wrestles him home and he finally softens up and tries to connect with the kid, usually acting like a kid himself, watching home movies of the parents in happier times. He borrows the truck and enlists the kid in trying to track down his mom via the drive-thru bank where she makes monthly deposits, then they follow her car and that’s how they find the peep show where she’s working for John Lurie. Lurie, Stockwell, Kinski and Stanton have all appeared in David Lynch movies – he might be a fan. After the German road movies I thought I’d rewatch this one in glorious HD before tackling the “ultimate road movie,” Until the End of the World.

I’m not above giving you the overused screenshots:

Claire Denis assisted… I’m not above the most obvious trivia either.

The kid is my age, Kit Carson’s and Karen Black’s son, later starred in a Tobe Hooper movie.

by ·Comments Off on Conquest (1983, Lucio Fulci)

Opens with an old man sending a young archer on his adventuring way, all double exposed on a beach with a Goblin soundtrack, and I’m afraid my story description from here on isn’t going to make much sense. Nicely summed up (in a positive review!) on lboxd: “every scene is clouded in iridescent fumes & I don’t know why anybody does anything.”

Wolf-suited tax collectors rip a girl apart so their snakey nudist leader can gobble her brains. Is she then killed by an arrow of light shot by our faceless archer or was that a vision? Our hero Elias is armed with a bow and four arrows, but is attacked by fourteen dudes, then rescued by an animal-loving stone-nunchuck warrior called Mace with lipstick runes on his forehead. Mace won’t kill animals so he steals all his food, keeps a cavegirl nearby until her head is smashed in by dog soldiers in the next scene.

Obsessively backlit – both this and Conan‘s best parts are their music, but this one is better for being wildly unpredictable. “Birds flying towards the water… that’s not good.”

Birdie:

The kid gets poisoned by a barrage of film-scratch darts coming from the weeds, and Fulci finds a way to get zombies into the movie as Mace braves a horde to collect a poison-healing herb. Then Mace gets attacked by his shadow self (Cactus-faced Zora in disguise) and it’s his turn to be captured by cobwebbed cave muppets, and the kid has to rescue him.

Somehow the kid keeps finding arrows in a land that’s never seen a bow before – have I mentioned this? – but finally he starts shooting blanks and letting the effects team add bolts of light. Mace is rescued by dolphins then attacked by powervaulting cave furries… the villains behead the kid but the nude woman can’t devour his brain because he opens his eyes… I dunno anymore.

Fulci in his heyday (The Beyond was the year before) ripping off Conan – even titled so they’d sit together alphabetically in video stores, good move. The kid’s career path was a Howard Hawks film -> this -> Werewolf with Joe Estevez. Stonechuck warrior Andrea Occhipinti had just starred in Fulci’s New York Ripper, and the nude girl Sabrina Siani specialized in playing the nude girl in this sort of movie. Like Conan this won no oscars. Big congrats to Oppenheimer but in another 40 years we’ll see which of these movies people are still watching.