Marie “daughter of Jean-Louis” Trintignant is Betty, a “drunken, self-destructive woman” who wanders into the life of Stéphane Audran. Each woman crashed out of society after losing a husband. Now Audran is dating local barman Mario (returning from a Chabrol/Audran movie 15 years earlier). The flashbacks are groovy, ranging from long sections to subliminally quick shots. Ultimately Betty runs off with Mario, leaving Audran to despair and suicide. The closing voiceover tells us it was always gonna be one woman or the other, though it never seemed like a struggle at the time.
Tag: 1990’s
Full Contact (1992, Ringo Lam)
A few groups of ultimate badass killer burglars get into death feuds with each other because nobody can act professional for just a few seconds at a time. A couple of love triangles here: hot dancer Mona is dating extreme badass Chow Yun-Fat (in his extreme badass era, same year as Hard Boiled) then when he disappears she bounces to sniveling ponytail weenie Anthony Wong. And Wong bounces from his best friend Chow to gay magician Simon Yam, falling in with Yam’s gang of villains (a girl named Slut and a guy who I just saw Riki-oh kill).
Injured Chow rescuing a dog:
Chow is supposedly killed on a job in Thailand, so everyone’s upset when he comes back around and starts using traitor Anthony as a spy. Didn’t feel as distinctive as the last Ringo Lam movie I saw, just a 90s actioner, the actors giving it as much life as they can until it’s time for the finale when twenty cars blow up while Chow and Yam have their monologues and shootouts. That’s not to say I didn’t have a great time watching these psychos torment and kill each other.
Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991, Lam Nai-Choi)
Movie opens with Ho Lik-Wong going to prison, chest full of bullets, getting on everyone’s bad side… that’s right, according to my version’s perverted subtitles, the lead guy in Riki-oh: The Story of Ricky is not even named Ricky.
The local toughs try to set the new guy straight, but Ricky beats the absolute hell out of them, quickly escalating matters to the higher toughs – there are so many toughs in this prison, really brutal dudes, and Rick One-Punch-Man‘s most of them into gory blood fountains. Somebody has Dead Alive‘d Brawl in Cell Block 99.
The assistant warden has a nice library of pornographic videotapes:
Of course Ricky has a flashback flute that triggers his backstory, and of course the toughs have various alliances and secret weapons and side plots. “The warden is the best kung fu fighter of a private prison,” so he transforms into a beast then is quickly crammed into the meat grinder by invincible Ricky, who sadly got no sequels. Ricky would go on to Supercop 2, some Donnie Yen movies, and Flying Swords of Dragon Gate. Eighteenth-billed Lam Suet would go on to twenty of my favorite Johnnie To films. Wouldn’t be a bad idea to watch the director’s other movies: a Maggie Cheung skeleton-fighting jungle curse adventure, a cat from outer space, something about opening the gates of hell, and one called Erotic Ghost Story.
Mouseover to punch your way right out of prison:
The Fall of Otrar (1991, Ardak Amirkulov)
The Odyssey from the Trojans’ POV. Guy with an eye injury arrives in town and does everything he can to get the king’s ear and warn everyone about Genghis Khan (the actor also played a Khan in Andrei Rublev), but is tortured and mocked for his troubles. The ruler destroys a caravan and finds a merchant with Genghis’s secret symbol, then kills Khan envoys, bringing total destruction upon his town, if it hadn’t been coming already, while the eye guy watches it all happen. Filmed in Kazakhstan over four years with great difficulty with finances and sets, my second movie this month like that.
Paul Duane gets it.
The narrative energy in The Fall of Otrar, just as in Khrustalyov, is generated by a beleaguered but headstrong character trying to cut through layer after layer of resistance to knowing the painful truth — the vanity of Kairkhan as a supreme leader, the duplicity of his Chinese advisers, the reflexive human habit of disbelief, and above all the sheer fact of torture and humiliation as the common currency of everyday life in this Eastern medieval world. If someone utters a thought that suggests a bad outcome, if they make a move or speak a word that somehow implies a violation of the absolute supremacy of the leader or the state, if they are even faintly suspected of anything at all, they are hung with chains from a crossbar in the blazing sun, burned with a hot iron, beaten to a pulp, or pushed to the ground and relieved of their tongue with iron shears.
…
In [Alexei] German’s films, and in Otrar as well, we are dropped into a mazelike world with no apparent points of entry or exit, where nothing is certain and where nothing makes complete sense apart from absolute power and its merciless enforcement. As the films unfold, the horizontal narrative progression is overtaken by a vertical accumulation of details, repetitions, strange proclamations and rituals, sudden capricious assaults, and coded transactions, layer upon layer of unease gradually evolving into horror.
Anaconda (1997, Luis Llosa)
Watched at the bar on mute, this appeared to be quite bad.
The director was a real 90s Guy, starting out with Erik Estrada and David Carradine then breaking through with Tom Berenger and Billy Zane. The editor did Miller’s Crossing and the DP did Jaws, but the writers did Turner & Hooch and Legal Eagles, and the lure of dodgy CG and a crazed Jon Voight as the villain dragged this down. The entire cast would make quick recoveries (Out of Sight, Three Kings, Heat Vision & Jack, Mr. Jealousy, Titanic, etc) and this movie would be forgotten, certainly not to receive a sweaty 2025 comic semi-sequel starring a bunch of comics I used to like.
The Ambulance (1990, Larry Cohen)
Having a difficult movie month here. Seijun Suzuki and The Cannibals were the best movies I’ve watched lately, but this one was the smartest decision. How do you follow up those, plus some major docs, a Jerry Lewis, the Arbuckles, the end of the Szulkin apocalypse series, and my big Cinema Scope roundup? With some brilliant late Cohen nonsense, of course.
Gang:
Janine Turner (Northern Exposure, Cliffhanger) collapses while large-faced Eric Roberts is harassing her. But Eric is no casual harasser, he’s a true stalker, devoted to figuring out why this girl (whose last name he doesn’t know) seems to have disappeared from the medical system after being taken away in a weird ambulance. He goes to a real hospital where he enlists his reporter roommate Red Buttons, and involves police officers James Earl Jones and Megan Gallagher, before uncovering a clonus-horror conspiracy of secret medical experiments and pilfered body parts.
Eric and Red:
Vint:
Coincidence? Cop Richard Bright was in Panic at Needle Park with Alan Vint, and in this movie they go searching for the ambulance drivers with only a uniform that says VINT as a clue. The story is nonsense and Roberts is a nut, but it plays well. Terribly choreographed fight scene between the ambulance drivers and a street gang. Eric was some years after Star 80 and Runaway Train, not long before he started appearing in 10+ movies per year. Eric plays a Marvel Comics artist under Stan Lee, in Stan’s first non-doc appearance – his second being Mallrats. Megan was in a Costas Mandylor movie, oh no. The evil doctor who ends up kidnapping Red Buttons as well as Janine had previously brought on the AI-pocalypse in Colossus: The Forbin Project. Most important is the incredible James Earl Jones performance, hammy but dignified, a must-see.
Dignity, even in death:
Uh-oh, ambulance:
Yumeji (1991, Seijun Suzuki)
Our guy is a notorious artist of sexy paintings (pop star Kenji Sawada has made good movie choices, playing leads in Hiruko the Goblin, Mishima, and Happiness of the Katakuris). His pretty young beloved is sick at home with her parents, wants to elope but not right now, so Yumeji enjoys a heavy romp with a prostitute, picks up another artist’s model, and becomes obsessed with a widow(?) and her bizarre story, until her husband (the crazy guy from Zigeunerweisen, even crazier) arrives and chases everyone around.
The Women of Yumeji: Covering her mouth tuberculosively is Hikono, who starred in Strange Circus. Center standing is model Oyo from a hitman movie called Pornostar and center seated/smiling is Mrs. Wakiya, who later starred in similar sounding Two Portraits of Miyagino (artist/prostitute love triangle, disappearance, kabuki-style sets). These two seem to have swapped personalities for this portrait, but I haven’t misidentified them unless they also swapped kimonos. I’ll dishonorably join the rest of the web in not being able to identify the others, but far left is the prostitute he’s with at the beginning.
I’m (re)watching these out of order, Yumeji coming a decade after Zigeunerweisen and Kagero-za – the cinema world loves a trilogy. Extremely loosely based on true events, the movie also plays fast and loose with dream/reality, life/death. Despite the apparent genre of “period artist biography,” it’s unpredictable and bizarre, with something crazy in nearly every shot.
Sean Rogers in Cinema Scope:
While Kagero-za ends with an unexpected and unnerving glimpse into some kind of afterlife, Yumeji begins a little more reassuringly, with events that soon get explicitly figured as a dream — even if the protagonist dreams of a duel in which he gets shot in the head. After all, the yume from Yumeji also means “dream,” as the renowned real-life painter Yumeji Takehisa muses toward the end of the film, which fictionalizes a period in his life from around 1918 … As in Zigeunerweisen and Kagero-za, the film closes with the prospect of Yumeji’s transportation across a body of water to a dimension of death or dream, this time ferried there by “the devil” Onimatsu.
When We Were Kings (1996, Leon Gast)
The champ, George Foreman, vs. the kid, Muhammad Ali, in Zaire
And other politics involved in the affair
Including rare footage leading up to the event
Plus, interviews with VIPs, remembering the effects
…
We heard about that legendary clashing of the titans
But could never have contextualized the metrics or environment
Until, 90 minutes of history
And images and music, I was riveted, infinity
Listened/half-watched while assembling furniture after turning on Henry Fonda For President and realizing it had subtitles. Good movie.
Dust Devil (1992, Richard Stanley)
Hardware was silly fun, Color Out of Space a real cool time, this movie is the Richard Stanley tiebreaker, and… I can dig it. We got just-okay storytelling, but baller filmmaking – South African post-Twin Peaks cult-killer stuff, with at least three cool birds.
Shelter me from the power of the finger:
Chelsea (one of Deborah Unger’s girls in Lynch’s Hotel Room) is on the run, and connects with roaming psycho Robert John Burke (between Hal Hartley movies). Everything this guy does, he does ominously. Her husband (of Space Mutiny: MST3K season 8) is after Chelsea and cops Joe and Ben (both of Cry Freedom) are after RJB. Eventually everyone will die except Chelsea, but she takes on the serial-psycho spirit and becomes the new RJB. The DP supposedly shot Highlander III: The Sorcerer in 1994, but that must be an AI hallucination – there were only two Highlander movies.
