by ·Comments Off on Hamlet Goes Business (1987, Aki Kaurismäki)

When the ghost tells Hamlet to avenge his death, he calls Hamlet stupid and H replies “Get on with it, it’s cold and I don’t want to be late for dinner.” This ain’t your gramma’s Hamlet!! It’s a black-and-white Finnish satire of the business world. In corporate Finland, there are no good guys, no sympathetic souls, just murderous fiends who all want to get ahead. Thus, it turns out Hamlet poisoned his own father, and in the end he is dispatched by the family chauffeur, a spy for the workers’ union.

Movie does have its funny parts (which include Polonius’s mustache), but I regret I can’t say it was a total delight to watch. Not a chore, either, and not mediocre or a waste of time, just a mild success, a Jarmusch-reminiscent dark comedy. All that Shakespeare probably held it back (although he cut all soliloquies and cut the story to a sleek 85 minutes). I’m still optimistic, wanna check out more Kaurismäki soon.

Our… hero?
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Polonius and his mustache:
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I liked the music… this band got to play a whole song in the middle of the movie. Note found online: “the film features a live performance of the song Rich Little Bitch by Melrose, a Finnish rock trio very popular at the time when the film was made.”
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Choice Kaurismaki quote: “When I was young, I would sit in the bath and ideas would come to me. But I’m not young any more, so now I just sit in the bath.”

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by ·1 Comment

1982: the year of Blade Runner, White Dog, Poltergeist, The Thing, Gandhi, Britannia Hospital, Fitzcarraldo, Fanny & Alexander, Tron, the Sting version of Brimstone & Treacle… and this, the legendary Worst Kurt Vonnegut Adaptation Ever. From young hotshot Steven Paul, one of the producers of Doomsday, and I know I just said I wouldn’t waste my time watching anything created by anyone involved with Doomsday, but the Vonnegut connection combined with this movie’s reputation for being one of the worst comedies of the 80’s forced me to watch it out of morbid curiosity.

Laurel and Hardy? The book was dedicated to them.
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Opens with narration by Orson Welles, surely giving even less effort than he did as the voice of the planet in Transformers: The Movie. You can immediately tell that the movie has no comic sense whatsoever. It looks cheap despite the big-name cast, and every “joke” is dead on delivery. The comedy is mostly people falling down, moving fast, talking funny (slapstick, I guess) and it’s badly staged… for instance, the twins are giant-sized, but only when convenient.

I don’t think Vonnegut was as mean-spirited towards the Chinese. And of course, Noriyuki “Pat” Morita is not of Chinese descent, but better him than Mickey Rooney I suppose. He plays the shrunken thumb-sized ambassador, a reference only understood by readers of the book since it’s unexplained during the movie. Other bits from the book are also rethought and bungled, and the twins are from SPACE now (and return to space in the ridiculous ending). All traces of Vonnegut’s trademark sadness and humanity are lost, unless you consider the sadness of the cast and the releasing studio and the audience. Rogue Cinema points out that the movie’s cast (Khan, Feldman, even Welles) and poster and title (and renaming the doctor “Frankenstein”) aimed to make audiences think that this would be a Mel Brooks Close Encounters parody. That particular advertising lie is probably the most well-thought-out part of the whole film.

Lewis!
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Khan!
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Madeline Khan and Jerry Lewis double-star as both the super-genius twins and their rich, detached parents. Marty Feldman is the butler in the twins’ secluded home. John Abbott plays a guy with a cool beard and Samuel FULLER is the colonel at the Military School For Screwed-Up Boys.

Feldman!
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Fuller!
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One of the last films of Jim Backus (Mr. Howell on Gilligan’s Island, voice of Mr. Magoo), John Abbott, Marty Feldman, and even Jerry Lewis (had starring roles in 6-7 more movies, most of them bad) but Jerry recovered in time to make Arizona Dream. Yes, Slapstick was a mega-career-killer, destroying the respectability of everyone involved! It ruined cinematographer Anthony Richmond, who previously shot the beautiful Man Who Fell To Earth and Bad Timing but went on to shoot Dane Cook movies and Dumb & Dumber 2. And – little known fact – it contributed to the death of Orson Welles and was directly responsible for his never completing Big Brass Ring, The Dreamers or Other Side of the Wind. Orson’s female co-narrator’s career was so thoroughly demolished that the internet has no record of who she was. But on the bright side, the movie helped launch the film career of Pat Morita, who would star in The Karate Kid two years later.

Morita! (he’s the one not looking at the camera)
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Music by Michel Legrand and a song with lyrics by Vonnegut were edited out of the movie after the original release – why?? Assistant-directed by Michel’s son Benjamin Legrand, ending his short career as assistant-director (begun the year before on Rivette’s Merry-Go-Round).

Everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads? The incest scene doesn’t go very far, because we need a “PG” rating.
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Released around the same time as Scorsese’s awesome King of Comedy, also with Jerry Lewis, though I think this was shot first and shelved for a while. Gene Siskel calls it “shockingly bad” and Ebert calls it offensive but makes a point of not blaming Vonnegut or Lewis. I heard one detectable Jerry joke: “You know, do as the romans do… when in rome, that is – I had it backwards” (it’s all in the delivery). There’s an occasional passionate line-read by Madeline or Jerry, the occasional animated bit of action, but mostly the movie moves mechanically from one laborious scene to the next, a simple motion illustration of a screenplay written by a guy who knows a guy who talked to a guy who once read the Vonnegut novel (which wasn’t one of KV’s best stories to begin with). I would looove to say that Fuller, Lewis and Feldman were excellent and the movie was slightly worth watching, but they weren’t and it wasn’t. I’m not in any hurry to rewatch Breakfast of Champions to decide whether this one is worse, but I think it probably is.

Close Encounters of the Dumb Kind:
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by ·Comments Off on Mountains of the Moon (1989, Bob Rafelson)

Boring movie about two white guys competing to be the first white guys to find the source of the Nile. Richard Burton (Bergin of nothing major) and John Speke (Glen of the last two Resident Evil movies) are on an expedition together in the 1850’s which is badly thwarted by angry Africans. They eventually return, Burton is injured and has to return home early, so Speke gets the glory for discovering the source. The two of ’em fight it out back at home for a while, plan a public debate to settle their stories, but Speke shoots himself on the day of. Burton was later a diplomat, knew a ton of languages, snuck into Mecca and translated “Arabian Nights” and the “Kama Sutra”… interesting guy. Fiona Shaw (H. Swank’s horrible mother in The Black Dahlia) plays his love interest/wife, and Richard Grant (How To Get Ahead In Advertising) plays someone or other.

Burton writing:
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Speke in trouble:
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Grant:
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by ·Comments Off on No Country For Old Men (2007, Coens)

Not quite what I’d expected. Thrilling, tense, exciting movie. Brolin and Bardem are impassive Western types, TL Jones is unexpectedly the protagonist. Hardly any music. Good chase scenes in river (brolin vs. a dog) and on abandoned city streets at night (vs. bardem).

TV star Garret Dillahunt played Tommy’s deputy. Kelly Macdonald, who I did not recognize from “Tristram Shandy”, was Brolin’s wife. I knew I’d seen Brolin somewhere… he was a lead in “Planet Terror” (and in The Goonies). Stephen Root as “man who hires Wells”.

On the way home, I was pondering the storyline, decided out loud that while most movies tell you “these are some things that happened”, this movie instead says “this is the way things are.” But I don’t remember what I meant by that.

P. Nugent of Screengrab says about the Coens/Fargo:
“I tend to think of the Coens as surface guys who put an incredible amount of conscious planning into the physical details of their movies, and who are inhumanly aware of how they expect both critics and audiences to respond to their cleverness. It might sound as if I’m one of those people who sometimes badmouth the Coens for being ‘merely’ clever, but cleverness is something I’m all for; at the very least, it sure beats lack of imagination. … Fargo is a smart, impressive movie, but it is also a movie outside what I think of as their best range, and a movie that I think they made for the outside world, a movie pitched at the mainstream.”

Great paragraph from E. Kuersten from his year-end roundup in Bright Lights:
“The Coens love circles… who doesn’t? In NO COUNTRY, locks come flying off in all directions leaving beautiful round holes in which to have light issue, peeping tom doors of perception through which one is able to read at least one thing: a circle! The hula hoops in HUDSUCKER, the hair cream tins in BROTHER; the hubcaps in MAN WHO WASN’T THERE… What do they mean? Exactly! Take ZODIAC, the amazing police procedural that disappears into the same plot void which drowned the old LEBOWSKI. Again, all you’re left with in the end is the shuddering realization that “Hurdy Gurdy Man” is the scariest song ever written. And then in the other corner, you’ve got Tommy Lee Jones playing more or less the same character in both NO COUNTRY and IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH, that is to say, the leather face of America as it looks off from the Medusa-eye view of the circular zodiac watch screen and crumbles to dust. There’s no easy answers, not no more.”

UPDATE: Watched again April ’08 under slightly adverse conditions. Not as caught up in the tension of the thing this time. I admire it as a technical achievement, great acting and direction, but I’ve been veering more towards Black Book because BB has all of those things as well as Something To Say. I’m not sure that No Country is saying anything valuable, and I’m not sure that the Tommy Lee Jones bits pondering the death of decent human behavior offers enough food for thought to outweigh the rest of the film’s constant reveling in human misbehavior.

MAY 2025: I ain’t reading anything above because my early posts are terrible and I was an idiot, but I had a good time watching the beautiful blu-ray of this great movie.

by ·Comments Off on Inferno (1980, Dario Argento)

“Help me. Rats are eating me.”

Rose (not shown here because I didn’t think to get screenshots until after she’d died) lives in a spooky “New York” apartment building above a rare book store run by cat-hater Kazanian. She reads his book about The Three Mothers (which is not such a rare book since he has a few copies in stock). Bumbles around the basement, drops her keys into an underwater room with a portrait of a Mother and some floaty dead bodies, then recovers from that only to be stabbed in the neck.

Kazanian hating on some cats:
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How to die in this movie, in three steps:
1. a hand injury
2. (optional) animal attack
3. stabbed in the neck

Rose’s mustachioed brother Mark is in Rome studying music with his buddy Sara, when he gets a mysterious letter from Rose referencing the Three Mothers book.

Mustachioed Mark, seen here whispering into a hole:
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Mark runs off, freaked out by a cat lady who appears in class, so snooping Sara reads the letter.

Cat Lady, seen here in music class:
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Sara picks up a copy of the not-at-all-rare book in Rome, and stumbles immediately upon another of the three evil buildings that the book mentions. She runs away from an evil alchemist and befriends a man in the elevator who soon gets stabbed in the neck.

Sara’s elevator buddy, seen here under a heavy blue filter:
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A monster catches Sara and dispatches her with a broken window to the neck. I am not kidding.

Snooping Sara shortly before getting her stupid self stabbed:
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Mark goes to “New York” to find his sister, meets her hot neighbor Elise. Elise helps get him caught up on the mystery, then she gets tormented by having stagehands throw cats at her from off-camera, and stabbed to death.

Elise on the set of INFERNO:
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Also in the apartment are an evil nurse who wheels around an evil old man, a nondescript woman (not shown), and a loyal butler.

Mark hassles poor Kazanian, who is later tormented by cats in his bookstore. Kazanian loads the cats into a bag, takes it to the river to drown them, falls down and is nibbled by rats before being stabbed in the neck. His own fault, really.

Back at the mysterious apartment building, the butler is probably evil (aren’t they always?) but I don’t remember for sure… anyway, his eyes are gouged out, breaking the knife-to-the-neck rule set forth by INFERNO in order to keep the “an eye must always be gouged out” general law of Italian horror.

Butler near a birdcage:
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If the butler isn’t the mastermind behind all this evil, it must be the old man, who lives like Phantom of the Paradise in the cellar with his listening devices and his robot microphone.

Phantom of “New York”:
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Wrong again! It’s the nurse who wheels him about! I think the movie is saying that she’s one of the Three Mothers and that she is very evil, but I’m not sure how far her evil extends, or if it’s even dangerous to people who don’t live in this apartment or attend music class or hate cats. But oh my god, when Mark goes downstairs to face her, the movie’s theme song plays with lyrics sung in Latin, and that is great.

One Evil Mother:
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The nondescript woman sets the place accidentally on fire (it’s an “inferno”, if you will), and the Mother is either delighted or horrified by this, hard to tell since at this point she is wearing a rubber skeleton mask, but anyway she throws her hands in the air and Mustache Mark escapes, the end.

My favorite part of the whole affair is the interview on the DVD, where a weary-looking Argento talks about what a difficult and personal film this was, and how he and assistant director Lamberto Bava (dir. DEMONS and DEVIL FISH) and his father Mario Bava (dir. Black Sunday and Diabolik) struggled over this effects shot where a woman dramatically crashes through a mirror and comes out wearing a fakey skeleton costume. Yep, it took the three greatest minds of Italian horror to come up with that one. If only they could’ve got Lucio Fulci (Zombi 2, The Beyond) and Umberto Lenzi (Cannibal Ferox) to make her a better rubber suit.

The underwater bit isn’t bad, which is the same thing I said about Zombi 2. Maybe the Italians should make a whole horror movie underwater.

At least I was so busy marvelling at the silliness of the whole thing that I didn’t notice the dubbing.

Implications of this movie:
– women (or maybe actors in general) are just set dressings to be put in pretty poses and then threatened and stabbed.
– there is something evil, and it’s been around forever, and it is easily defeated by unknowing incompetents, though honestly it’s better off being left alone since it’s not much of a threat to anyone.
– alchemists are scary, cats are evil, architecture is evil

I think Eyes Wide Shut was based on this movie. The atmosphere and pacing, the camera zooms, the drowsily agitated characters, the fake New York, the singing in Latin… it all adds up.

Total Film mag and the They Shoot Pictures List call this one of the best horror movies of the ’80’s, but those people are tripping.

This is a semi-sequel to Suspiria, and Dario Argento’s brand new film Mother of Tears is a sequel to this one starring his daughter Asia (as a woman in trouble) and Udo Kier. Mustache Mark never amounted to much… Rose appeared in Puppet Master and Watchers II… Sara was in something with Marcello Mastroianni and Tom Berenger… Elise has been in all the big Italian horrors and will appear in Mother of Tears… the nurse was in The Beyond… Sara’s blue-tinted friend dubbed the title character in the Italian release of V For Vendetta… the old wheelchair man appeared in The Seventh Victim in 1943… and Kazanian was the husband in Last Year at Marienbad!

by ·Comments Off on Labyrinth (1986, Jim Henson)

Back in fashion because of Pan’s Labyrinth.

I keep coming back to the “Dance Magic Dance” song, the biggest batch of silliness that Bowie gets himself mixed up in. He manages to be pretty cool throughout the rest, despite being a glammed up villain in a pg-rated movie. Jennifer Connelly is fine as a spacey, dorky girl. She was better in Phenomena.

Warwick David AND Kenny Baker played goblins. Terry Jones and Elaine May writing, and George Lucas exec produced.

All that talent involved, all those puppets and matte paintings, and what do we have? An over-expensive little mess of a movie. Pretty funny in parts, but not too cool anymore as an adult. Another one lost. Saw parts of Beetlejuice on TV the other day and I’m sure that one’s still good. Still, a fun enough time at the movies. There aren’t enough puppets in movies these days.

Katy says she shouldn’t have even gone.

by ·Comments Off on Donnie Darko (2001, Richard Kelly)

Kelly’s follow-up Southland Tales starring The Rock and Buffy is finally getting released later this year, or so I’ve heard.

Forgot how GOOD this movie is. Somehow I’d chalked it up as a sentimental underdog fave, but I still really like it.

Donnie’s dad will be in Southland Tales, and we caught him last night in Bring It On.
Donnie’s mom plays the president of Battlestar Galactica.
Samantha Darko is Lilo in Lilo & Stitch and a regular in Katy’s Big Love.
Bunny Suit Frank was in every “cool” teen movie in the 90’s.
Donnie’s teacher is in Southland Tales, No Country For Old Men, and Little Miss Sunshine (as a pageant official).
Recording artist Jena Malone will be in Into The Wild and The Ruins.
Seth Rogen of Knocked Up was apparently in there somewhere.
Donnie’s psychiatrist had starring roles in Butch Cassidy/Sundance Kid, The Graduate, The Final Countdown and Stepford Wives.

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by ·Comments Off on Wend Kuuni (1982, Gaston Kaboré)

Seems from the quotes below like this was a pioneer work for African film in the early 80’s, but today on video it’s not too interesting to me. Pedestrian filmmaking, awful music and a voiceover that doesn’t seem too sure of itself.

To be fair, the music and voiceover are hardly ever around, and what’s left is a simple story of a mute boy who gets adopted by a weaver, befriends a little girl, and finally sees something traumatic (suicide body of older guy who got publically shamed by his young wife) that causes him to start speaking about traumas past (mother who was chased out of town for being a witch because she wouldn’t remarry).

People converse in a casual, disinterested way – guess that’s a cultural thing, since the usual tendency with inexperienced filmmakers/actors is to over-emphasize everything.

Kino says it is “a clever fable demonstrating how traditional values can heal and unify a modern African state.”

American University Library says it “demonstrates how cooperation and caring can overcome bigotry and intolerance.”

Library of African Cinema notes that it was the first prominent feature film produced in Burkina Faso, and a pioneering attempt to “Africanize” film language. Dialog was kept at a minimum, to maximize understanding among different language groups.

Harvard Film Archive: “One of the first films to adapt the measured rhythms of traditional African storytelling, Wend Kuuni recasts a precolonial tale of village life during the Mossi empire into a lyrical cinematic form.”

Cineaste: “Kabore’s work, however, does not merely project a lost paradise, it also has contemporary overtones in its depiction of bold actions by women in defiance of the patriarchal order.”

Buud Yam in 1997 was a sequel, a Wend Kuuni coming-of-age story, which doesn’t seem to be on video.

by ·Comments Off on Yeelen (1987, Souleymane Cissé)

Was beaten out by a Maurice Pialat film for the Palme d’or at Cannes, but it still won the jury prize (not the GRAND jury prize – I don’t know exactly how things work at Cannes).

Terrific-looking, bizarre film from Mali (large, landlocked, northwest Africa).

Niankoro (N.) has some sort of magical powers. He and his mom have been hiding out, but dad is hot on their trail, so they go off to find help. While she prays in the swamp, pouring milk over herself, N goes looking for an uncle. His father Soma has a magical post (and two non-magical post-carriers, AND a twin brother with his own post) which may lead him to N. N stops in a village, tries to help out, defeats some bandits and offers to help the king impregnate his youngest wife. But then N impregnantes her himself and gets to keep her. N finally gets a wooden wing from the good uncle, combines it with the gem he got from mom, and confronts his dad with apocalyptic results. Overall, it’s sort of a goofy Western. Or a Malian Star Wars?

The web tells me “Yeelen is the adaptation to film of one of the great oral epics of the Bambara people, set in the thirteenth century, during the period of the Mali Empire.” Katy sent me a long PDF file explaining the mythology but I haven’t read it yet.

Movie opens with a rooster being burned to death… Soma also burns an albino man but not on-screen.

Michael Dembrow helpfully interprets:

Though set in a time far from history, Yeelen clearly reflects Mali’s contemporary situation in 1987, when Mali was firmly in the grips of the military dictatorship of Moussa Traoré. Cissé has acknowledged the difficulty that he would have had in mounting a direct critique of the regime: ‘As my own experiences have shown, what you narrate may also put you into trouble. Sometimes in order to survive a hostile environment one is forced, not necessarily to disarm, but to construct a narrative that is not too political nor devoid of pungent criticism of the system’.

It is difficult not to connect Niankoro with the young men and women who were willing to risk their lives for positive change in the last days of the Traoré regime. Looking within the tradition, taking guidance from those elders whose connection with the positive aspects of the tradition remains intact, they are attempting a synthesis of tradition and the modern. These are people who know how to listen to the song of the Sankofa bird–those who heed the values of the past in order to proceed to a moral, community-building vision of the future. From the vantage point of 1987, the film predicts the violent upheavals of 1991 that would produce many sacrifices, but ultimately new hope for the generations to come.