by ·Comments Off on Everybody Wants Some!! (2016, Richard Linklater)

I don’t have the critical skill to explain why a slice-of-life movie following a college baseball team’s party antics for the three days before classes begin seems so essential right now.

Katy liked it but the drunk girls gave her unpleasant flashbacks to Saturday Night Fever‘s rape scene and she was unhappy that the college freshmen looked to be in their mid-20’s.

Let’s see, Jake was our freshman protagonist, Beverly was the girl he likes and Beuter was his cowboy roommate… I guess Jay was the argumentative freshman pitcher with giant glasses… a week later, the rest of the guys are kinda a blur, so let’s watch it again.

Said to be spiritual sequels to Dazed and Confused and Boyhood, so let’s say it’s also a prequel to the Before series, creating a whole Linklater Cinematic Lifetime (much preferable to a Marvel Cinematic Universe).

It’s rare that an IMDB trivia article is truly interesting, but check this out:

The character Willoughby has a complete collection of the Twilight Zone television series on VHS. The Twilight Zone episode “A Stop at Willoughby” concerns a character who longs for a more idyllic past and takes drastic steps to recapture it. Similarly, in the film, it is revealed that Willoughby took drastic steps -falsifying his transcripts and lying about his age – so he could continue to play collegiate baseball and cling to an idyllic past.

M. Singer:

What initially appears like a mob of dumb jerks, reveals itself as a collection of lovably quirky and hilarious individuals of different backgrounds and beliefs … The team goes to a series of different clubs — disco one night, punk the next — which makes Everybody Wants Some both a lively survey of early ’80s pop culture and a microcosm of every college’s freshman’s search for identity.

D. Ehrlich: “Plotlessness is the new plot.”

by ·Comments Off on Thief (1981, Michael Mann)

Taking Cannes Month way back to 1981, this played in competition alongside Possession, Excalibur, Heaven’s Gate and winner Man of Iron. Mann’s first theatrical feature, though he’d already made TV prison/sports movie The Jericho Mile and written/created the series Vega$. Frank (James Caan, best known as Mr. Henry in Bottle Rocket) gets out of prison and has a clear plan for the rest of his life and the safecracking skills to fund this plan. All he needs is a girl (Tuesday Weld of Lord Love a Duck) and to reunite with his friend (Willie Nelson)

Tuesday is along for the ride but other things start going wrong. Willie dies his first day out of prison, and gangster Leo (Robert Prosky of Broadcast News, a priest in The Keep) offers to help Frank line up a big job and get him and Tuesday a fast-track adoption, and somehow professional criminal Frank isn’t savvy enough to realize that Leo’s not gonna let him do a couple jobs then walk away.

I’m fortunate to be watching this for the first time in the mid-2010’s. The movie’s keyboardy Tangerine Dream soundtrack went from a cool experiment to a long-lasting embarrassment, staying that way for decades until post-Drive it became cool again. Drive seems indebted to this movie’s ending as well, when the hero leaves the girl behind to go on a potentially suicidal rampage against the guys who wronged him – or maybe that’s just how all crime movies end.

I love the bizarre, against-type casting of Willie Nelson and Jim Belushi (pre-SNL, his first movie) as Frank’s partners – wish Mann had kept doing that. Of course it’s Mann-stylish, all slick streets and street lights, but what seemed stylish in the early 1980’s looks pretty subdued today.

The two Jims:

The movie’s one De Palma shot:

by ·Comments Off on Shoah (1985, Claude Lanzmann)

Don’t know how Lanzmann did these interviews with such an even temper and tone. Must have taken a great deal of restraint in the town where locals joyfully admitted making throat-slitting gestures at passing trains full of camp-bound Jews, or when interviewing a German doctor in charge of the starving Polish ghetto. My most recent cinematic response to nazis was Inglorious Basterds, and it’s hard to focus on the facts and details here without imagining escape/revenge fantasies.

Auschwitz-Birkenau:

Lanzmann rarely edits an interview, doesn’t use tricks to seamlessly cut out pauses or repetitions. I didn’t deal with the enormity of the film all at once – instead, having just finished Show Me a Hero, I treated this like another miniseries, watching in 60 to 120-minute increments, which made its relentless death-camp horrors easier to take – or maybe not, since I spent more consecutive days thinking about them. The length and focus of the movie seemed on point, but by the time we got to hour eight, talking to people who scheduled the “special” trains who claimed no knowledge of what made them special, I thought okay, this is a bit long.

A phrase caught my attention, upsettingly familiar-sounding this year: the Jews of the ghetto were “forced not only to build a wall, but to pay for it.”

I haven’t got enough documentary history (or holocaust scholarship) to know how this movie changed things, but I noticed a few unique details. In some documentaries the interview subject will get emotional, tear up, and the camera will zoom into to their faces and I’ll think “this is a bit crass.” The same thing happens here, the camera zooming in, Lanzmann patiently urging his crying subject to continue, and it never seems exploitative – interviewer and subject are on the same moral side, and when Lanzmann tells them that it’s important to continue, you’re with him.

Some interviews are recorded with covert videocameras (which, in the late 1970s, were not very covert) broadcasting to a van outside. Per wiki, “during one interview, the covert recording was discovered and Lanzmann was physically attacked. He was hospitalized for a month and charged by the authorities with unauthorized use of the German airwaves.”

Lanzmann shot hundreds of hours of footage and has edited four more feature-length films from them so far. Filmed in part by William Lubtchansky, who was doing great work with Rivette and Godard and Varda and de Gregorio and Straub/Huillet and Truffaut around the same time. Won lots of raves and awards – no oscar nomination, but Lanzmann is now an academy member and was apparently a fan of Son of Saul last year.

Per Kent Jones, Shoah was “the Hebrew word for catastrophe or destruction, which had been in use among some Jews since the early forties.”

Jones on the structure:

The film would consist only of testimonies and new footage shot at the sites where organized killing had taken place, and of images shot where the people on camera were living at the time of filming; there would be no experts making grand theoretical summations; … with two exceptions, the people on camera would be either perpetrators, victims, or bystanders (to borrow the categories established by Hilberg); the film would restrict its focus to the systematic annihilation of the European Jews; and it would be a work of cinema as opposed to an audiovisual historical summation.
…
By situating his film in the present and creating conditions that allowed us to see that it was coexistent with the past, by questioning his subjects about concrete details only, by creating an atmosphere of quietly urgent attention, by constructing a form that left the impression of multiple possible beginnings and endings, Lanzmann achieved something that was not only unprecedented but was, and is, an astonishment: he returned the Shoah to the civilized world that had disowned it.

by ·Comments Off on Evil Dead double-feature

Nice intro to the upcoming Alamo Drafthouse, a free outdoor double-feature at the nearby Sokol Ampitheater. I’ve seen these a bunch of times, but not lately.

The Evil Dead (1981)

Still more horror than comedy, but some over-the-top punishment and gore got chuckles from the crowd. Screened in its original 4:3 (I hadn’t realized there’s aspect-ratio controversy, but apparently Raimi advocates a cropped widescreen version). Don’t think I’d noticed before how great the music and sound is on this movie.

Cheryl is attacked by trees then possessed by demons and locked in the cellar. Shelly’s possessed next, dismembered by Scott. Linda gets possessed and finally she and Scott and Cheryl are all tormenting Ash, who takes no meaningful action until about the last 15 minutes when he beheads one of them and tosses the Necronomicon in the fire, causing the rest to decompose.

Evil Dead II (1987)

I love how ten minutes into the movie there’s only one living character and he’s possessed by demons. Fortunately two archaeologists and two local rednecks soon show up in order to get possessed and torment Ash some more… and of course Henrietta is discovered in the cellar. I wish this hadn’t been screened with singalong subtitles over the scenes that somebody found quotable, but it wasn’t too distracting. Bobbie Jo starred in the recent We Are What We Are remake and Ash’s girlfriend Linda married Steve Guttenberg.

The first Evil Dead came out the same year as The Howling, Scanners and Possession, though sequel-mania had already hit the genre, with Friday the 13th 2 and Omen 3 and Halloween 2. Raimi made the disappointing Crimewave before joining the sequel craze with Evil Dead II in 1987, which was my Year Zero of horror, with Hellraiser, The Gate, House II, Elm Street 3 and The Lost Boys.

Cowriter Scott Spiegel later made Intruder (“gore galore” says the IMDB review). Appropriately, Evil Dead II cinematographer Peter Deming shot Cabin in the Woods (and Mulholland Dr. and Lost Highway!). Looks like Raimi hasn’t made anything since Drag Me to Hell, and those rumors of an Evil Dead remake and TV series never came to pass.

by ·Comments Off on SCOTtober double-feature: The Hunger and Alien

Checked out Tony Scott’s The Hunger for the first time in lovely HD, then watched his brother Ridley’s Alien on blu-ray the same night for a SCOTtober double-feature.

–
The Hunger (1983)

Cool looking movie with Nic Roegian editing – and I noticed this before listening to Tony Scott’s commentary, where he admits to being Roeg-obsessed. Scott worked in commercials, and brings their slick-as-snails visuals to a noirish vampire flick, opening with a Bahuaus video intercut with agitated lab monkeys. If that sounds like something that might not fly with the public, it apparently didn’t.

The eternally-youthful Catherine Deneuve is a centuries-old vampire living with true love David Bowie. Bowie seems like perfect casting for a vampire movie, but something goes wrong and he starts rapidly growing older (it’s perverse to hide Bowie under age-makeup), trying at the last minute to get help from blood specialist Susan Sarandon, and eating a neighbor kid (soap star Beth Ehlers) in a panic.

Aged Bowie:

Master vampire Deneuve is used to this sort of thing, stashes Bowie in the attic with the other aged corpses of former lovers, and begins seducing Sarandon. But Dr. Susan is too self-aware for vampire life, kills herself, and the zombie lovers rise up to destroy Catherine.

No fangs – our vampires use ankh-shaped knives to bleed their victims. A bit too many slow-motion doves flying but mostly the style works in the movie’s favor. Not according to Ebert, who called it “agonizingly bad” but enjoyed the sex scene. Played out-of-competition at Cannes, where Bowie’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence was competing with L’Argent, The King of Comedy and Nostalghia.

Scott later directed two episodes of the 1990’s anthology horror series The Hunger, hosted by Bowie. Enjoyed seeing Dan Hedaya as a cop but I missed Willem Dafoe’s cameo. Sarandon’s lab coworker Rufus Collins had previous vampire-film experience in Warhol’s Batman Dracula, and her other coworker Cliff De Young starred in Pulse and Dr. Giggles. Writer Whitley Streiber explored werewolves in Wolfen and aliens in Communion.

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Alien (1979)

Has that Star Trek: The Motion Picture tendency to slowly bask in its models and space effects. The creature puppets weren’t as dodgy-looking as I remember them (though there’s such a bad edit right before Ian Holm’s disembodied head starts talking).

Spaceship control room looks like a sound booth with Christmas lights:

After watching this and Prometheus on blu-ray within a couple months of each other, I don’t get why people think there needs to be more connection between the two – one seems to be referencing the other pretty clearly to me.

There’s this thing:

And this guy:

And dudes who touch things they should not be touching:

And an android who does not appear to have everyone’s best interests at heart (his orders end with “crew expendable”).

You don’t think of Tom Skerritt as being the first-billed star of Alien, but I guess Weaver was an unknown at the time (or they didn’t want to telegraph who will survive from the opening credits). Veronica Cartwright had been in Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake the year before. Harry Dean Stanton doesn’t do much horror but Wise Blood and Fire Walk With Me might count. Yaphet Kotto starred in Larry Cohen’s Bone and lived through Freddy’s Dead. And John Hurt has appeared in Hellboy, Only Lovers Left Alive, and something called The Ghoul.

by ·Comments Off on Police Story (1985, Jackie Chan)

A pretty bad mid-80’s cop movie with average acting and horrible comedy. But oh man, when the action scenes start, there is nothing better. Cars barrel down a hill right through a shanty town, Chan uses cars as weapons and shields, and it ends with a jump/fall so great they show it three times. Plot-wise, Chan has to protect Brigitte Lin from gangsters before she testifies. He does a poor job gaining her trust (having a disguised fellow cop pretend to attack so Chan can save her) then does a poor job explaining her presence to his indignant girlfriend Maggie Cheung.

Fake-attack:

Movie puts forth the Clint Eastwoody idea that gangsters can’t be convicted in the courts because the system is corrupt, so it’s best to kill them straight away. But oh man, the action scenes. Non-action highlights include an endless court scene with all dialogue in Cantonese except the oft-repeated English phrase “I object,” and a dogshit moonwalk.

That’s Maggie on the left:

Won best picture/choreography at the HK Film Awards (vs. fellow nominee Mr. Vampire, heh), got at least five sequels. Maggie was still three years away from As Tears Go By, Brigitte starred in Peking Opera Blues the following year, and baddie Yuen Chor directed over 40 films in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

by ·Comments Off on On Top of the Whale (1981, Raoul Ruiz)

“Too much culture leads to barbarism and hinders development.”

One of those Ruiz movies like The Blind Owl and Manuel on the Island of Wonders, where it’s hard enough to make sense of the movie, but my low-res video copy makes it even harder. So this will have to count as a preview screening before Criterion inevitably announces their 12-disc blu-ray set of 1980’s Ruiz films. I just made myself unreasonably excited typing that sentence.

Anyway, like those two movies and City of Pirates, Ruiz blends psychology and imagery and politics and sarcasm in unlikely ways, creating a film that can be explained (as I attempt below) in narrative terms, but the story isn’t really the point.

Narcisso (Fernando Bordeu, Virgil in Ruiz’s A TV Dante) is a commie millionaire who invites a couple of sociologists (Luis: Jean Badin, who had small roles in Genealogies of a Crime and Three Crowns of the Sailor, and Eva: Willeke van Ammelrooy of elevator-based horror The Lift) to his house to study Adam and Eden, the two surviving members of a tribe with a complex and ever-changing language. Yes, the movie has characters named Adam, Eve AND Eden. But like Blind Owl and City of Pirates, the story is mainly a framework for Ruiz to pepper us with imagery (shadows and double exposures and massive red tinting), experiment with structure and language, and confound his own characters.

Luis (left) and Narcisso, with Adam and Eden in the background:

Ruiz’s and cinematographer Henri Alekan’s follow-up to The Territory. Lot of business involving mirrors (obvs, with a character named Narcisso). Mentions of offscreen wars. Characters tell stumbling stories, read lists and transcripts, boring the other characters (shades of the sleepy Stolen Painting narrator). Colonialism humor, language gags, references to similarly playful texts (I was proud of myself for recognizing dialogue from Calvino’s Invisible Cities). I think in the end, Eva and Narcisso end up together, Luis commits suicide, and Eva’s son becomes pregnant.

“7th May. Each month Adam and Eden exchange names.”

Q: “Are proletarians always strange?”
A: “Too much exploitation has made them strange. The pain has turned them insane.”
Q: “Do all proletarians of the world unite because the pain has made them insane?”
A: “No, that’s something else.”

Page 70 of the Michael Goddard book has an interesting bit on “accented cinema” which seems too long to transcribe here.

Rosenbaum:

This is one of Ruiz’s best collaborations with Chilean composer Jorge Arriagada — as much a mainstay in his work as Bernard Herrmann was for a spell in Hitchcock’s — whose scores specialize in furnishing lush, atmospheric Hollywood climaxes, often without any apparent dramatic motivation.

by ·Comments Off on Hairspray (1988, John Waters)

Oops, you all forgot to tell me that this is one of the best rock & roll movies ever made. I guess Rosenbaum put it on a couple lists, but the rest of you let me down. Thrilling to see this in theaters, even 17 years late, to see why people at my high school used to mention Ricki Lake so much (she’s very lovable here), to see Divine in a double role right after watching Polyester, to hear all the classic songs and see goofball appearances by new-wave heroes (Deborah Harry as the villain, Ric Ocasek as a cartoonish beatnik painter) and witness the movie’s idealized version of desegregation in Baltimore the same week there were actually riots there.

by ·Comments Off on Polyester (1981, John Waters)

Inspired by Douglas Sirk movies, and inspiration of the song “Frontier Psychiatrist”. An extreme example of the normal person pushed-to-the-brink genre, and starring Divine (not even a normal person). Everything that can possibly go wrong does so all at once – she turns to alcohol as her pornographer husband leaves, daughter is pregnant by her delinquent boyfriend (Stiv Bators of The Dead Boys, writer of Sonic Reducer), son is a foot-fetishist sex criminal, and the family is being protested by the neighbors. Divine’s still got her friend Cuddles, her former housekeeper who recently inherited great wealth, and starts to recover in the company a sexy stranger (Tab Hunter of Track of the Cat) – but it turns out he’s actually dating Divine’s mom, and the romance was a plot to get money. After all this pain (even if it’s over-the-top comedy-pain), Waters allows some lightness (even if it’s murdery lightness). The son is reformed, the delinquent is killed, Cuddles’s chauffeur/fiancee Heinz runs down the mom and Tab, and all (who remain) live happily.

Divine’s superpower is her keen sense of smell, hence the Odorama cards (which we didn’t get, alas). The Ross played it off an average-quality DVD, but it’s a good movie to watch with a crowd. My head exploded when the movie had a profitable highbrow drive-theater showing a Marguerite Duras triple-feature. It also featured the same tasteless lawn jockey that my landlords have. Department of Redundancy Department: an imdb user calls it a “mainstream overground non-underground movie.”