by ·Comments Off on Violent Cop (1989, Takeshi Kitano)

V-Cop is introduced beating up a high schooler who attacked a homeless guy, hell yeah. The new chief likes his style but wants not to be disgraced by association, V-Cop doesn’t care, has little respect for the bosses. Turns out cops are supplying the drug dealers, and VC’s baddie-killing investigation technique gets him fired. He’s having a nice day as a civilian when punks kidnap his sister and a hitman stabs him and blows a bystanders’s head off. Final showdown: VC and the hitman blast each other full of holes, he finishes off his sister, the drug trade carries on with barely a hitch. Great theme music, a familiar Satie tune.

I liked the rookie partner’s expression when VC ran over a suspect:

by ·Comments Off on Silvestre (1982, Joao Cesar Monteiro)

Supremely cool movie, the artificial look gave me flashbacks to Perceval Le Gallois. I guess I like Monteiro now, and there’s plenty more to see.

Without Affinity I don’t know how to remove weird watermarks:

Maria de Medeiros looked exactly the same age 22 years later in The Saddest Music in the World, doesn’t transform from a damsel into the warrior Silvestre until the last 40 minutes. Her sister was in Francisca the same year, went on to star in Tabu. Luis Miguel Cintra is the villain here, and Paio also played second fiddle to Cintra in Ilha dos Amores and Satin Slipper.

by ·Comments Off on Fellow Citizen & First Graders

Toothache (1983)

I hurt my tooth on a potato chip, so what better time to catch up on some early Kiarostami films. I’ve had the Koker blu box set for a couple years now, so it’s time to watch that, but first checking out the films he made just before Where Is The Friend’s House.

This would be a completely uninteresting educational short – first half follows a kid who doesn’t like to brush his teeth, and second half is a lecture from his dentist. The one thing that gives it an edge is that during the entire dental lecture you can hear the kid and other patients squealing and crying while getting poked and drilled.

–
Fellow Citizen (1983)

Stress-inducing condensed hour at work with a traffic guard tasked with preventing people from driving into the city center unless they have a permit or a special exception. Guess what, it turns out every single automobile driver in the city is a very special person with very special circumstances who deserves to be let through. Our guy lets them all through but feels increasingly taken advantage of and starts denying access more and more, among nonstop yelling and honking. Ends with a pure frustration montage set to the most psych-rock song of any Kiarostami film.

–
First Graders (1984)

After an attendance-taking intro, we spend the day in the principal’s office doing conflict resolution. Unlike the people at the traffic stop, the participants here seem unaware of the camera. They are little kids with undeveloped concepts of right, wrong, truth, etc., and you can see their big puzzled thinking faces in closeup. Halfway through, the camera unexpectedly follows the kid on crutches home, getting a bicycle lift from his dad. Overall some suspiciously posed/staged camera angles for a straight doc. It also follows an American Beauty plastic bag, as AK keeps changing his mind about what kind of movie to make.

by ·Comments Off on Eastern Condors (1987, Sammo Hung)

Chinese prisoners are dropped into Vietnam days after the US pulled out of the war to destroy a weapons cache before it falls into enemy hands. Kind of a Dirty Dozen plot, but these guys are not soldiers, and the first one dies tragicomically because he doesn’t open his parachute in time due to a stutter when counting to twenty. But the USA was counting on the idea that all Chinese people know kung fu (true), and that losing comrades one at a time over the course of an arduous Vietnam mission in a 1980’s movie will turn one of them into Rambo, and this happens to Sammo, who completes the mission. By the end he’s killing people using tree leaves as missile weapons – it’s acting like a serious war movie, the action scenes short and brutal (and sometimes astounding), but with the kinds of moves you’d expect from a parody.

Thin-mustached colonel in charge is Lam Ching-Ying of Mr. Vampire and all the Bruce Lee movies. Yuen Woo-Ping is Mouse (loses his legs during a machine gun bridge crossing) and Original Foon Yuen Biao is Weasel, but various translations refer to both men as Rat, so overall the cast is hard to figure out. The commando girl who sticks with them is Joyce Godenzi (the future Mrs. Sammo Hung), and the evil giggling general (Criterion: “like a eunuch villain from a King Hu film transported to the present”) is Yuen Wah of Kung Fu Hustle.

The movie’s final words still resonate today:

by ·Comments Off on Golden Eighties (1986, Chantal Akerman)

A mall-set musical. Nobody respects horny young Robert, not his girl Lili at the salon across the aisle, not even his parents who run the clothing store where he works. Lili waits until Robert is about to marry her coworker Mado before running off with him. Meanwhile his mom has her own drama, bumping into long-lost American lover Eli, who wants her back, while she focuses on running her shop and barely gives him the time of day.

Reluctant salon owner Lili played the lead in a Vicente Aranda movie.

Jean (Jean-François Balmer of Cosmos) owns Lili’s hair place but she doesn’t love him, so he finally wrecks the place in a rage and sells his lease to the neighbors.

Robert’s mom Delphine, post-makeover, with Eli: American director John Berry, who made He Ran All The Way with fellow blacklistee John Garfield

Pascale Salkin (left, the girl who isn’t Maria de Medeiros in I’m Hungry, I’m Cold) bounces between plots, and is the only person in Golden Eighties to also star in The Eighties, which is somehow not out on video. Would-be fiancee Mado later appeared in Carnages. Nathalie “Conann” Richard played a nameless hairdresser coworker of theirs, and neighbor Sylvie who runs the snack shop was in films by Demy, Varda, Sautet, Ozon, Lelouch, etc.

Robert’s dad has the best voice of the men here (Charles Denner aka The Man Who Loved Women). Delphine Seyrig would only star in one more feature – Joan of Arc of Mongolia – before dying of cancer at 58.

by ·Comments Off on The Big Chill (1983, Lawrence Kasdan)

Great opening titles, introducing all the characters as a music montage cut with the body of their dead friend being dressed, closing on shot of his stitched-up wrists. It’s a hangout film after that, former classmate/friends who now all have good jobs and drug habits. Some light resentments and conflicts, some secrets and such, one delightful ending.

JoBeth Williams had just starred in Poltergeist, her outsider husband is an object of fun. Meg “sister of Jennifer” Tilly (Body Snatchers), also an outsider, had been Dead Alex’s girlfriend so they all feel responsible towards her. Mary Kay Place (between New York, New York and Pecker) is a lawyer with bad hair who wants to get pregnant but has no man, so is sizing up her friends (and gets the movie’s best insult-comic line). Kevin Kline is the nice-guy husband of Glenn Close (between Garp and The Natural) who’d had an affair with Dead Alex. William Hurt, messed up on pills, had already starred in Altered States and Body Heat. Mustachioed Tom Berenger is a TV celebrity (actually on his way to Major League immortality after an oscar-nominated stop in Platoon). And reporter Jeff Goldblum would reunite with Kline and their dead friend Kevin Costner in Silverado. Lost the same writing oscar as Fanny & Alexander, Kasdan went on to make the terrifically bad Dreamcatcher. Wiki says the last ten minutes were meant to be a 1960s flashback with Costner-as-Alex, and it was cut… and I see the blu-ray has ten minutes of deleted scenes… but they’re completely different scenes, no fair. At least Criterion had the good sense to commission an essay by Lena Dunham.

by ·Comments Off on Dogra Magra (1988, Toshio Matsumoto)

The Funeral Parade of Roses guy two decades later has turned to narrative… but it’s super-meta-psycho-narrative, at least. In the 1920s an institutionalized amnesiac is given conflicting stories by a hairy Dr. Detective and a bald Wacky Doctor, and instead of piecing together the real story, he either goes on a killing spree, or doesn’t.

Which of these doctors would you trust:

Labyrinth of Dreams was based on the same author’s work, and I wondered if the novel was an influence on Shutter Island. The boy went on to be a voice actor, most notably dubbing Leo in Titanic, and the not-bald doctor/detective Hideo Murota is in all the Kinji Fukasaku movies. Unsurprisingly this cinematographer also worked with Terayama.

by ·Comments Off on Flesh + Blood (1985, Paul Verhoeven) +2

Oddball adventure movie post-Conan the Barbarian with modern slang/language, setting up a love triangle for young JJ Leigh between dim warlord Rutger Hauer and rich wannabe-scholar Tom Burlinson (title role in The Time Guardian), both of whom are dicks to her anyway. Sure it’s full of raping and pillaging, and a nun gets conked in the brain, and plague meat is catapulted over the walls, but most of the fun is in guessing Leigh’s intentions as she goes from captor to queen of the gang after they conquer a castle, earning Rutger’s respect by teaching him to eat with a fork, then trying to rescue both of her men during the final showdown.

Rutger vs. Octopus:

Untrustworthy bounty hunter Jack Thompson is in all the big Australian movies I haven’t seen (Breaker Morant, Wake in Fright, Jimmie Blacksmith), Rutger’s ex-pregnant ex-queen Susan Tyrrell specialized in weirdo comedies (Forbidden Zone, Cry-Baby, Big Top Pee-Wee). Brion James pops up a fair amount. Matt Lynch: “an incredibly skeptical story of superstition & tradition giving way to pragmatism & capital. Money, religion, love, sex, class; spoiler alert: power is power, everyone’s full of shit, survival is the only cause.”

Displaced Barbarian Queen Susan:

Brion James fate foretold:

–
Starship Troopers (1997)

“Oh Johnny it’s us… it’s home.” All the kids are supposedly South American but no two people can agree how to pronounce “Ibanez.” Holds up, never looks cheap, Verhoeven firing on more cylinders than on the 1985 movie. Neil Bahadur: “One gets the sense that Verhoeven took this god-awful script and flipped it without changing a word.”

Where’d these people end up? Jake “Son of Gary” Busey played murderers in The Frighteners and Contact. Dizzy was a cop in the first four Saw movies. Caspar has only ever appeared in two other movies: Sleepy Hollow and Alita, both of which are due a rewatch, and Denise was in Edmond and Wild Things, which, same. Sgt Clancy “Mr. Krabs” Brown has achieved Vaguely Recognizable status after I’ve seen him in twelve movies. Michael Ironside is so cool that I might actually watch that Bob Odenkirk revenge movie now that I know he’s in it.

–
Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Semi-rewatch while assembling furniture, really much better than part two if you’re not looking directly at the screen, despite tediously starting with the final showdown instead of making up a cool secondary pre-credits adventure.

by ·Comments Off on The Green Ray (1986, Eric Rohmer)

Marie Rivière (marriage-plotter of Autumn Tale) gets into a series of awkward social situations, some of them self-caused (she’s a preachy vegetarian), while increasingly feeling that her summer vacation is slipping away.

Won the Venice Golden Lion, same year as The Beekeeper and A Room With a View. I should have realized Green Flash Brewing is named after the same phenomenon. I didn’t love this as much as others seem to, but Jake and Lawrence wrote good justifications for its greatness.