by ·Comments Off on Brazil (1985, Terry Gilliam)

Great to see this again, although maybe I should’ve sprung for the high-def version to see if it looks much better than my old letterboxed DVD. Katy agreed that the movie seems long, and opted not to teach it in her dystopian fiction course.

I’ve seen people call Brazil the centerpiece of Gilliam’s dream trilogy – Time Bandits being the dreams of youth, Brazil of adulthood, and Baron Munchhausen an old man telling dream-stories to children. It’s a lovely thought, but then what is the rest of Gilliam’s career full of dreams and visions?

Don’t think I knew who Jim Broadbent was the last time I watched this. He plays Sam’s mom’s plastic surgeon: “Snip snip, slice slice, can you believe it?” Jack Purvis of Time Bandits is rival doctor “the acid man”. Sam’s mom’s friend getting acid treatments (“my complication had a little complication”) is Barbara Hicks of Britannia Hospital, and her daughter is Kathryn Pogson, recently of The Arbor. Mrs. Buttle (I’d forgotten how good she is) was Sheila Reid (Felicia’s Journey, Lady Rawlinson in Sir Henry at Rawlinson End). I haven’t recognized Kim Griest in anything else but I see she was in Manhunter and CHUD. Mr. Helpmann (‘ere I am, JH) was in some Ken Russell films and Mountains of the Moon. Sam’s useless first boss was Ian Holm and his decisive, always-walking boss in Information Retrieval was Ian Richardson (later Mr. Book in Dark City).

by ·Comments Off on The Handmaid’s Tale (1990, Volker Schlondorff)

A real stinker of a bland-looking generic 1980’s movie, starring Natasha Richardson (Mary Shelley in Gothic) as a “handmaid” in the future whose job is to get pregnant for rich barren women (Faye Dunaway, two years before Arizona Dream) by their husbands (Robert Duvall, between Colors and Newsies). But of course she falls for house servant Aidan Quinn (who’d play evil twins the following year in an Isabella Rossellini movie) and gets involved with a troublemaking friend (Elizabeth McGovern, the mom of Downton Abbey). So it’s surprising that with all this star power around, the only good scene was with a doctor played by Rawhead Rex star David Dukes.

by ·Comments Off on Bad Blood (1986, Leos Carax)

Pure cinema! Young, wired Denis Lavant flees girlfriend Julie Delpy to help Hans and Marc (Michel Piccoli) on a heist in place of Lavant’s murdered father, and falls for Piccoli’s girl Juliette Binoche. Camera races Lavant down the street. Amazing skydiving scene (the editing, the parachute’s-eye top-down shot, the sheer audacity). It’s a spare story, and Lavant dies at the end, mourned by both girls. Delpy and Binoche had both previously appeared in Godard films, were later the stars of White and Blue, respectively.

by ·Comments Off on Babette’s Feast (1987, Gabriel Axel)

Lovely natural-light drama spanning many years in the lives of two puritanical Danish sisters. Muchache Man Lorens loved one of them, and the following year a French singer loved the other, but the sisters end up with only each other – and French cook Babette (played by the great Stephane Audran of so many Chabrol films).

sister Filippa and Mr. Papin the opera singer:

sister Martine and Lorenz:

Eventually it’s revealed that Babette was head chef at a world-class French restaurant, and after preparing the sisters’ very simple meals for thirty years, she spends her lottery winnings on one extravagant dinner for the sisters and their church friends (including a visiting Mustache Man Lorens).

Katy and I liked it. We watched on Valentine’s Day, coincidentally the week director Gabriel Axel died, and during the first earthquake I’ve felt while living in Atlanta. Adapted from a Karen Blixen story. IMDB claims it’s the current pope’s favorite movie.

M. Le Fanu:

We can agree, at any rate, that Audran’s performance is serene and authoritative. Could the woman she is playing have been based on a once living person? At bottom, one never really knows where stories come from, especially the good ones. Dinesen’s story has an absolute “rightness” about it that we recognize from classical fairy tales. Its tone, its humor, its kindness, its flashes of sardonic wit, the ease and confidence of its storytelling—all these attributes seem, at times, self-perpetuating, and independent of mere human agency. It is as if the best stories, miraculously, write themselves. Axel’s film manages to capture this anonymous and folklorish quality. Faithful to the story, he has made grace visible, and given us, in addition, a wonderful lesson in courtesy.

by ·Comments Off on Return to Salem’s Lot (1987, Larry Cohen)

As Nathan Rabin might say, this film is quite poor.

But look who co-stars:

It opens, as all respectable horror films do, with a tribal ritual sacrifice. Maverick tough guy journalist Michael Moriarty (star of Q: The Winged Serpent) is called back to the States and saddled with his neglected son Jeremy. They head to the country where Mike has inherited a family home in a town full of vampires led by Judge Andrew Duggan (Merrill’s Marauders). Jeremy falls in with the vampires, is sweet on a very young Tara Reid (Bunny Lebowski). The movie’s specific vampire mythology seems unclear, especially where it concerns Jeremy and Tara, even though the Judge tries to explain it to us. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention cuz I was wondering where the blue rubber-mask demon had gone, when Sam Fuller would appear, and what was going on with Moriarty. Mostly he and the movie seem resigned to their crappiness, the straightforward genre plot, but occasionally there’s a spark of life, some Cohen attitude in the dialogue, some fire out of Mike.

Finally, Fuller arrives as a nazi hunter turned game vampire killer. The two guys pretty quickly and easily start slaughtering the townsfolk, killing bunches as they sleep before getting cornered. Fuller fakes suicide – I wouldn’t have advised laying bloody and prone in a room full of vampires, but it seems to work out for him. The kid awakens from his pre-vamp haze and stakes the judge with an American flag.

Bunny:

Shooting the judge in the head does not work:

by ·Comments Off on Say Anything (1989, Cameron Crowe)

Why isn’t this on here already? Half-watched again in Minnesota. Nice guy Cusack and rich girl Ione Skye (star of Girls In Prison) are in love. Her dad John Mahoney (novelist W.P. Mayhew in Barton Fink) disapproves and gets her to dump him, but his opinion ceases to matter when he goes to prison for fraud, and Cusack’s Peter Gabriel-soundtracked obsession wins out. Also, Lili Taylor sings some songs. Crowe manages not to wreck the movie through overuse of pop music, possibly because he couldn’t afford it yet.

by ·Comments Off on Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989, Aki Kaurismaki)

“Do you know Mexico?”
“… Sure.”
“Go there.”

Ridiculous comedy about soviet musicians who head to America to find their fortune. The movie’s deadpan consistency won me over. By the time the “deceased” band member they’ve been carrying frozen atop their car thaws out and joins them mid-song (a development I saw coming an hour earlier but still enjoyed watching), I was happy that there are sequels to look forward to.

Bunch of guys who look like TV’s Frank and wear pointy clown shoes to match their haircuts go on a road trip through America (from NYC to Mexico), playing small clubs along the way. They’re all pretty indistinguishable except for their tyrannical manager, the long-lost cousin they pick up somewhere in Texas, and the idiot Igor who followed them from home attempting to help. A.K. lets the songs play out, making it a sort of concert film.

Kaurismaki was in synch with Jarmusch, shooting in all the same locations as his earlier Down By Law the same year Jim was filming the similarly rockabilly-referencing Mystery Train. He appears as a car dealer in this one. The Idiot is Kari Väänänen (Polonius in Hamlet Goes Business) – he and band manager Matti Pellonpää have been in a bunch of Kaurismaki’s movies.

Igor at a Memphis barber shop:

Thru the Wire (1987)

Criterion/Hulu also had some of A.K.’s short films. This is a noirish clip – Nicky Tesco (cousin/vocalist from the feature) escapes from prison, seeks his woman while being chased by cops.

Rocky VI (1986)

Giant Russian Igor completely destroys wispy American Rocky (and some officials) in the ring. The music track is dark, with layered vocal samples – and yodeling, at one point.

by ·Comments Off on Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985, Paul Schrader)

The movie is divided into sections. Three are adaptations of Mishima novels with autobiographical elements, and they’re tied together with interspersed b/w newsreel-like reenactment of Mishima’s final day (starring Ken Ogata, lead killer in Vengeance Is Mine), with some flashback footage of his youth. It’s an excellent approach to cinematic biography, though I suppose it wouldn’t work on everybody. Philip Glass, who introduced the film at Emory, provides a varied score (less driving lock-grooved than his others).

This would seem like a weird choice for Schrader to follow American Gigolo and Cat People, but he’s apparently a longtime fan of Mishima and of Japanese cinema. His sister-in-law is Japanese and wrote the dialogue. I’m sure he explains all on the Criterion commentary – that DVD has got hours of fab-looking extras.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion: clubfoot student Koichi Sato pals with stutterer Yasosuke Bando, teaches him to exploit his disability in order to score with chicks. It works, and Miss Universe contestant Hisako Manda gets nude, but this is not to the stutterer’s liking, and he decides to destroy everything that is beautiful.

Kyoko’s House: Young man (Kenji Sawada) becomes obsessed with bulking up through weight training. He finds out his mom is deeply indebted to a dangerous loanshark, so he sells himself to pay his mom’s debts, and the two become locked in a spiraling sadomasochistic relationship ending in double suicide.

Runaway Horses: Pro-Emperor militant cult leader Isao (Toshiyuki Nagashima) plans an attack on the government but they’re arrested before they can carry it out. Isao escapes, kills one of the targets (Jun Negami, who appeared in the Mishima-starring Afraid to Die) on his own, then performs seppuku before the rising sun.

Mishima’s actual words are used as narration, in Japanese by Ken Ogata in the restored version, which is what we saw. English-release narrator Roy Scheider later appeared in Naked Lunch, another movie that mixes a novelist’s biographical details into his work.

by ·Comments Off on Damnation (1988, Bela Tarr)

Karrer (Futaki in Satantango) is kind of a loser. Dumped by his married girlfriend, he hangs out at local bars in a mining town until one bartender hires him to transport a package. So he talks the married girlfriend and her husband into helping him – they must be the only people he knows – and oh, how he talks them into it:

“This way it’s a nice family story. But it finishes like any other story, because stories end badly. Stories are all stories of disintegration. The heroes always disintegrate, and they disintegrate the same way.”

I’m not sure about the details. A coat check woman philosophizes. Karrer gets back with his girl, whose husband is in debt. The package has been opened. Things are missing. Karrer ends up at a police station. “It was this awful inner tension that brought me here, because of my deep respect for order. Please do not consider my report as a confidential case, but cheap tattling, and I authorize you, if necessary, to mention my name.”

Karrer ends the movie out in a junkyard barking at a dog.

Along the way: long shots, pouring rain, 4:3 b/w cinematography. Bela Tarr-like. It’s supposed to be the movie that kicked off Tarr’s long-take style, which means now I have only the social realist early films to check out. Finally watched this because I got a free preview offer for Janice Lee’s new Bela Tarr-inspired book, also entitled Damnation. Apologies to the publisher, but I am months and months behind right now – still looking forward to reading the book, and will post on it when I do.

P. Bradshaw: “Any conceivable drama or furtive eroticism latent in all this is entirely passed over in favour of a dark and general assessment of the futility of it all. It is as if Tarr has disengaged from these preposterous local activities and stepped back to inspect the bigger picture. … This is not a film that will have you whistling a happy tune on your way out of the theatre. In fact, a responsible manager will demand your tie and bootlaces on the way in.”