Sequelitis. Tyrannical band manager Vladimir returns from the wilderness claiming to be Moses, leads the group to Coney Island then to Siberia, stealing the nose of the Statue of Liberty along the way. Andre Wilms, star of Le Havre, plays an American agent on their tail trying to return the nose. Cowritten by two band members and featuring much of the gang from the first movie plus a Jarmusch cameo. Vladimir died of a heart attack the next year, so no more sequels, but there’s a concert film called Total Balalaika Show, which Hulu wouldn’t let me watch.
Tag: 1990’s
Winter’s Tale (1992, Eric Rohmer)
An inverse of Summer? In Summer, guy is waiting for girl 1, dates girls 2 & 3 in the meantime, when girl 1 finally arrives they don’t stay together. Here a girl is waiting for guy 1, dates guys 2 & 3, when guy 1 finally arrives they stay together. A fairytale true-love/soulmate movie, which seems an odd fit for the series. I was annoyed at the magical ending early on, since I saw it coming a mile away, but had time to prepare for the inevitable, and it’s hard to stay mad when things turn out so nice and deserved. But the characters seemed less real than in Spring and Summer – it felt academic. Maybe some of this is explained by the play-within-the-play, as our characters watch a production of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, which is known for its abrupt happy ending.
Opens with Felicie (Charlotte Very of Blue and Lady and the Duke) and Charles (Frederic van den Driessche of Brisseau’s Exterminating Angels) very much in love. A few years later Charles has disappeared and Felicie is raising their daughter alone. He had the wrong mailing address for her, then both of them moved and they couldn’t find each other. She’s in Paris, dating academic Loic (Herve Fulric of a 1982 Les Miserables) and also her hairdresser boss Maxence (Michel Voletti, lately of The International), but doesn’t really see herself with either. She’s convinced to move away with Max and start their own business in another town, but she quickly decides that her loyalty and love are for Charles, moves back to Paris and runs into him on a bus.
Won some prizes in Berlin, playing alongside La Vie de Boheme, Center Stage, Naked Lunch and big winner Grand Canyon.
Clueless (1995, Amy Heckerling)
In the aftermath of the 100 Great Movies by Female Directors list making the rounds, Katy decided it was time I watched this. She played with her phone through the whole movie.
I thought the slangy dialogue didn’t sound too dated, but that’s probably just because Katy and I still use some of it (because we are old). It turns out Alicia Silverstone was actually fine, and Batman & Robin and Aerosmith videos weren’t adequate vehicles to express her talent. Her costar is Stacey Dash (Damon Wayans’s love interest in Mo’ Money). Plus Paul Rudd, Dan Hedaya, Wallace Shawn, and a bunch of people whose names sound vaguely 1990’s-familiar but I never knew who they were.
Now I just need to see Fast Times at Ridgemont High and what, Rock & Roll High School?
May 2026: Watched again with K and her mom – still a good movie, and a decade later I still haven’t seen Fast Times or R&R High School.
Tale of Springtime (1990, Eric Rohmer)
“Simple conversations engender complicated human interactions,” says the IMDB plot description. Copy/paste to every Rohmer film.
Restless Jeanne doesn’t want to stay at her boyfriend’s place while he’s out of town but she has lent her own place to a cousin (wearing major shoulder pads), explains this to random teenage girl Natacha (Florence Darel, Joan the Maid 2) Jeanne meets at a party, ends up coming home with her. Natacha’s busy father (Hugues Quester, a crazy person in City of Pirates) has a nice place in town and another in the country, but young Natacha is usually left alone while he stays at his new girl Eve’s place. So after initial meetings, the rest of the movie is the four of them meeting in various combinations in those two locations. Natacha is not fond of Eve, would like dad to date her new friend Jeanne instead, despite both their protests. It ends the way you would expect a Rohmer movie to end, with the main character making a decision, declaring their values and the reasons for this decision aloud. I don’t know why I love these movies but I do, and am very glad the whole Seasons series is playing Filmstreams this month.
IMDB says no award nominations. Link must be broken.
The Passing (1992, Bill Viola)
Soundtrack is the heavy breathing of a person trying to fall asleep, so the movie segments are dreams, I suppose. Lights, cloth, water, children, landscapes. Some movies are described as journeys, but this is one of the few that actually feels like one.
Some of the low-light video is great. It has a very different look from film, and is something you don’t see often, even though video technology has been everywhere for decades.
Official description says it “juxtaposes personal pictures of his mother’s death with images of his own son’s birth to explore foundational and potent themes of beginnings and endings, the cycle of life and the movement of generations” – I can buy that.
Nightbreed (1990, Clive Barker)
Hetero White Male Boone has been having bad dreams, getting calls from psychiatrist David Cronenberg, who is secretly giving his patients hallucinogens. Then a bagface knifes some kid’s parents. Boone’s girlfriend Lori does karaoke at a club. Crazy Boone goes to hospital, where he meets a cheery longhair who scalps himself. All this leads Boone to Midian, underground dwelling of monsters, whose prophet he will become, to the consternation of their gill-cheeked leader Doug Bradley. But there’s trouble before Boone can take his place as prophecised hero, because either he or Cronenberg (who works nights as the psychotic bagface murderer) leads the humans to the monster pit, and a redneck army destroys the pit, driving the monsters away.
Barker creates a fantastic bunch of characters (everyone except Boone) but maybe it’s best he stopped directing. The newly restored director’s cut doesn’t change how creaky and graceless everything is. Everyone talks like they’re in a movie, one guy even screams “nooooooo!” But I hadn’t seen this since the VHS days, was worth revisiting. Maybe I’ll see if I can find the comics.
Cinematographer Robin Vidgeon had shot the first two Hellraiser movies with Clive. Whole companies are credited with the foul crimes committed against movies: “20th Century Fox drastically cut this film at the last minute prior to its theatrical release,” and everywhere it’s Fox this and Fox that. I’d like to see the individuals listed more often, IMDB credits for specific studio execs who sunk the movies.
Princess Mononoke (1997, Hayao Miyazaki)
Final movie we watched in 2014, if we don’t count the disc of Brakhage shorts I put on for New Year’s Eve. Katy was impressed at how weird and non-Disney it seems. There’s a magical nature god with healing powers whom the title character tries and fails to protect, then a fight over its severed head, after which the movie’s main character decides to join the mining town whose leaders have been trying to destroy the forest and its spirits all along. With a more straightforward Avatar approach, the forest-destroying, spirit-killing factions of humanity would be the villains, but here everything is more morally complex.
Most distractingly recognizable voice in the English version: Billy Bob Thornton as a mercenary monk. Minnie Driver led the mining town, Gillian Anderson played the giant wolf that Mononoke hangs with, and Keith David (the guy who fights Roddy Piper for an hour before putting on the glasses in They Live) was the giant blind pig.
Memorable: the cursed boar Ashitaka fights at the beginning, setting him off on a journey to find where it came from and un-curse his arm. And especially the bobble-headed tree spirits.
Batman Returns (1992, Tim Burton)
The best Christmas movie we could find on netflix at the time. Katy had never seen this, did not know the joys of a flipper-fisted Danny DeVito and leather-suited Michelle Pfeiffer and fright-wigged Christopher Walken and Burton’s light-and-shadows pop-color photography and Elfman’s huge soaring music all stealing Micheal Keaton’s own superhero film out from under him. Batman has an undeveloped love interest in Pfeiffer, some last-minute heroism (diverting DeVito’s city-destroying rocket penguins into the zoo), obligatory Batman/Bruce identity crisis, but no major personality or emotion or story developments. And that’s fine with me – Batman movies could’ve gone on forever like this.
Totally missed noticing Paul Reubens as Penguin’s father, damn. Doug Jones (Abe Sapien in Hellboy) played a clown, and Jan Hooks (just-deceased SNL actress) Penguin’s mayoral campaign handler. Happy to see Michael “Tanner ’88” Murphy as the mayor and the great Vincent Schiavelli as Penguin’s monkey man.
Also watched the first 15 minutes of the first Burton Batman movie. Forgot that Jack Palance plays the crime boss who sends Nicholson into the Joker-backstory factory. Billy Dee Williams plays Harvey Dent, who does not get two-faced in this one.
The Stendhal Syndrome (1996, Dario Argento)
Someday I’d like to visit Italy and see if everyone acts the way they do in Argento films, moving all artificially and speaking poor dialogue out-of-sync with their mouths. Probably it’s just a very bad movie. And that’s not even counting the fact that it’s about a rape investigator (played by Argento’s daughter) who gets repeatedly raped (she’s also a cop who repeatedly gets her gun stolen), then it justifies this in the second half by having her become the killer. “He forced his way into me and now I can’t get rid of him.” Worse, I’m not even sure why I watched this. I’d previously read up on Argento and decided which movies might be worth watching (just the ones I’ve seen plus Crystal Plumage, Grey Velvet and Opera), and Stendhal Syndrome was not on the list. Maybe I put it on the netflix blu-queue as a placeholder? Anyway at least the picture on the disc looked fantastic.
The earliest Asia Argento I’ve seen, two years before New Rose Hotel. After being kidnapped and raped the first time she acts prickly towards a creep coworker (Marco Leonardi, love interest Pedro in Like Water For Chocolate) who is relentlessly trying to date her, starts seeing a psychologist (Paolo Bonacelli of Salo, one of the few films more icky than this one), and eventually returns to her stress-inducing family (to relax, haha), where she’s followed by both creep Marco and blood-obsessed rapist Thomas Kretschmann (Argento’s Dracula, also in Queen Margot with Asia).
Then she kills the rapist but keeps insisting he’s still alive, as she carries on his work, taking out the psychologist, her new French boyfriend Marie (a boy with a girl’s name as the movie continually mentions), Marco and a couple others.
Moo Orleans:
And by the way, Asia has the Stendhal Syndrome, which causes you to become entranced by works of art, but the movie doesn’t know what to do with this, plot-wise. It combines well-staged practical effects with the worst computer graphics I’ve ever seen, which is used with Fight Club excess (why, when she swallows pills, must we follow them down her throat?). It’s not just 1996 CGI – it’s Italian 1996 CGI. The movie has story problems (a half hour in, it’s already explaining its first scenes in flashback), missed opportunities (Marco brings Buster Keaton videos to a girl who imagines herself falling into paintings, but we get no Sherlock Jr. clip) and the unsurmountable flaw of having no recognizable human behavior. After reading that interview about invisible acting in The Dirties, and watching well-performed horrors like Hellraiser and The Tenant, this is especially disappointing. At least I could enjoy the paintings, the cinematography and the blatant Vertigo references.
Asia takes up painting:
Things I remembered while going through screenshots: (1) Asia gets amnesia between passing out at the art gallery and being raped by the loony, (2) she kisses a fish in a dream sequence, which looks like the romantic opposite of the zombie-vs-shark scene in Zombi 2, (3) she sees graffiti come alive in the loony’s lair, (4) her dad is freaky.
Asia loves fish:
