by ·Comments Off on Ronin Gai (1990, Kazuo Kuroki)

Random samurai movie watched on Criterion’s Hulu channel when it was free for a week – thought I’d pick something unlikely to come out on DVD anytime soon, since I’d never heard of the movie or director. It was surprisingly excellent, with assured, quality filmmaking and an exciting, complicated story – handily better than the Samurai trilogy.

1836: Bull, rough-looking with short black beard, is an ex-samurai so poor he lets people beat him up for money. He, drunken pimp Gennai and slightly more respectable Horo end up drinking together after a fight had seemed inevitable, turns out they’re all in love with one of the bar girls Oshin. Now, it gets a bit hard to follow because the main girls in the film are named Oshin, Osen, Obun, Otoku and Oyo – I tried to remember Osen as the “o-girl” for about ten minutes before realizing my mistake.

A dead woman is discovered:

Anyway, everyone is poor, struggling to survive in general, but now a group of rich moralists are killing girls every night. Bull acts as the women’s caretaker, is teaching them to read, and takes the murders very personally. And all the men would like to join the local clan, because then they’d get a salary. Local birdseller Doi’s sister Obun goes to the clan bosses to interfere in her brother’s behalf, essentially joins the prostitutes. Gennai starts dallying with rich clan woman Oyo, and Bull gets a job as a “dog”, servant to one of the seven asshole clansmen who turn out to be the murderers, eventually kills Oyo for his master. The clansmen decide to rip Oshin apart with bulls attached to ropes, and somehow the other two guys find out in time, come over and kill about fifty guys in the big climactic battle. Bull isn’t gonna get an easy out after slaying that woman, stabs through himself to kill his master. Postscript: Oshin leaves town with Gennai, Obun takes over the bar, and all surviving clan samurai are asked to commit harakiri for disgracing the shogun.

Oshin, about to be rescued:

Bull killing his master:

Director Kuroki died in 2006, made Evil Spirits of Japan in 1970. From the screenwriter of the Yakuza Papers series, based on a novel previously adapted in the 1920’s as a whole series of films. Nominated for a pile of Japanese academy awards, mostly beaten by Shinoda’s Childhood Days and Kohei Oguri’s The Sting of Death (though they also nominated Die Hard 2 for best foreign film, so it’s not clear they can be trusted).

Shintaro Katsu (Bull)’s final film – he was Zatoichi, Hanzo the Razor, and star of Man Without a Map. Gennai was Yoshio Harada, also of Manji and Farewell to the Ark. Young Oshin was Kanako Higuchi, the young painter’s mom in Achilles and the Tortoise, Obun was Kaoru Sugita, Sho Aikawa’s wife in Dead or Alive and Otoku was Moeko Ezawa of Kitano’s Getting Any?

by ·Comments Off on Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997, Johan Grimonprez)

Watched this during the site’s month-long hiatus. Any recollection of it? Not really. I know it’s by the guy who made that meta-Hitchcock movie. Let’s see if scrolling through the DVD sparks any memories.

Oh yeah, a narrated collection of stock footage, largely about hijackings, plus some random period clips, sidetrack stories and poetry by the narrator (aha, it’s inspired by two Don DeLillo novels) and segments about airport security. Not as gripping as the Hitchcock movie since it has no through-line plot or characters, but the history of airplane hijacking would earn the movie more interest a few years later.

R. Jones calls it “Grimonprez’ sensible indictment of art’s failure to produce a meaningful impact in Modern culture comparable to terrorism.”

by ·Comments Off on Up, Down, Fragile (1995, Jacques Rivette)

Weird and delightful movie with a Gang of Four/Va Savoir feel, but more so, made with the usual suspects: Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent on script and Nicole Lubtchansky editing, plus Christophe Pollock (Class Relations, In Praise of Love) shooting.

We follow three women: Louise (Marianne Denicourt of La Belle Noiseuse), Ninon (Nathalie Richard, “Madame” in Never Let Me Go, also Irma Vep), and Ida (Laurence Côte of Gang of Four). Louise just got out of a hosiptal of some sort and inherited a house from her aunt. Ninon has short blonde hair, works in moped delivery. An hour in, both of them have met Roland (Andre Marcon, king in Joan the Maid), a slightly mysterious (but not too mysterious – he runs a business making theater sets down the street) stalker who knew Louise’s dead aunt and has knowledge of a secret club (of course he does). But the club really exists, and seems honestly sinister, and I’m impressed that Rivette has finally given in to his secret-society teases (though come to think of it, the one in Don’t Touch The Axe was pretty effective), but then it turns out to be kind of a joke. Meanwhile Ida just creeps about, or sits at her library job trying to remember the title of a song in her head.

A girl (Louise) and a gun:

Intrigue: Louise has a stalker, actually a bodyguard named Lucien (Bruno Todeschini, thief of Va Savoir) hired by her dad. Ninon steals cash from work and gets away with it, though her coworker who was manning the register gets fired. Roland has secret papers proving that Louise’s dad is a crook. There seems to be a lot of wordplay that isn’t translating in the subtitles. And halfway through, the movie becomes a musical!

Ninon and Louise find something to dance about:

The girls visit a nightclub called Backstage, where Vivre Sa Vie star Anna Karina is a singer (and Ninon is an electrifying dancer). It’s here that Louise gets pulled into the secret club, where she is chosen to kill another member, then given a gun filled with blanks. Bodyguard Lucien is falling for Louise, Ninon is involved with Roland, and Ida has a weird connection with Anna Karina – I’m afraid I missed the point of Ida’s role besides the joy of watching Laurence Côte. Actually that might have been the point of the entire film.

Adrian Martin on the first musical number: “Haut bas fragile is about the dream of everyday life metamorphosing – via only the slightest nudges of stylisation – into the idealised realm of art, and specifically popular-musical art. Rivette’s films, with their obsessive walkers and mannered talkers, have frequently circled this moment of ignition, but here he goes all the way: love expresses itself in ironic, playful postures and swooning falls.”

J. Rosenbaum:

All three actresses created their own characters – a procedure Rivette also followed in Out 1 and Celine and Julie Go Boating. And just as Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto are solitaires in Out 1 and Julie is one in Celine and Julie before she meets Celine, Ida in Up Down Fragile might be described as someone who’d like to be in a musical but can’t because she doesn’t yet know who she is. The adopted daughter of provincial parents whose letters she doesn’t answer, she’s obsessed with fantasies about who her real mother might be and with tracking down a song from her early childhood, of which she remembers only fragments. (Eventually her obsession leads to a meeting with Sarah, a cabaret singer, played by Anna Karina, whom we’ve already seen in scenes with Ninon and Louise.) Narratively and musically, Ida’s in a perpetual state of becoming – the only creature to whom she’s attached is a cat. Meanwhile the other lines in the fugue are the processes by which Ninon and Louise acquire romance and friendship and thereby work their way into musical numbers, all of them various kinds of duets.

A rare director cameo:

June 2024: Watched again in HD. Some points I’d forgotten: Ida is sad that she doesn’t know who her parents are, and Roland is trying to hide the fact that Louise’s dad is a scumbag.

Lately… Nathalie Richard became a Michael Haneke regular, then a Bertrand Mandico regular, costarring in his new Conann movie… Marianne Denicourt was in a bunch by Claude Lelouch and an Agatha Christie miniseries by the Martyrs guy… Laurence Côte was just in a Virginie Efira identical twins melodrama that played Cannes… and we’re still mad at André Marcon for leaving Isabelle Huppert in Things to Come.

by ·Comments Off on Quartier Mozart (1992, Jean-Pierre Bekolo)

Immediately reminiscent of early Spike Lee movies in style. Weirdo comedy from Cameroon. I didn’t follow all of the plot threads, but would have followed even less had we not read up on the movie ahead of time. The characters all helpfully introduce themselves to camera at the beginning, but there may be subtitle problems (“Call me GOOD FOR IS DEAD”). Somewhere in this jazzy intro, a young woman called Queen of the Hood apparently expresses a desire to experience life as a man, and so Mama Thecla transforms her into “Myguy” in a scene reminiscent of The Terminator (Myguy appears naked inside a fog-blanketed truck).

Myguy starts dating Saturday, the sheltered daughter of hard-ass local boss Mad Dog. I lost track of a couple other characters, but Mama Thecla had also transformed herself into Panka, a man who can cause other men’s penises to disappear with a handshake. She does this apparently for the hell of it, and it’s treated more as a hilarious prank than a source of terror in the community. After Saturday falls in love with Myguy, he meets Panka again and they transform back into their female selves. No word on where this leaves poor Saturday or the local men’s disappeared genitals. Audio commentary on the DVD would definitely be interesting, but alas, it’s in French.

Acquarello:

[Panka] becomes My Guy’s guide and protector to the social and sexual politics of the quarter: a self-made man who reinforces his stature by taking on a second wife, the subtle inculcation of Christianity into daily life, even as the people continue to practice traditional – often conflicting – customs, the marginalized role and maltreatment of women that sharply contrasts with their real roles as family nurturers and community builders (and, as in the case of Mad Dog’s exiled first wife, literally feeds society when she sets up a vending stand near a high traffic street). As in [Spike] Lee’s films, Bekolo uses archetypal characters, informal fourth wall address, jaunty camerawork, and integral incorporation of pop music to illustrate the paradox of social and gender inequity and anachronism of contemporary life in post-colonial Cameroon.

Katy liked that it referenced American culture (Denzel Washington, Michael Jackson’s African influences) and America’s view of Africa (starving children).

by ·Comments Off on Sankofa (1993, Haile Gerima)

Or, Django Chained… and raped and tortured, branded, starved and left for the vultures, raped some more, and whipped and whipped and whipped.

A desperately unpleasant slavery movie with a slight framing story (present-day photo model shooting on a historic slavery site gets sent back in time by a meddling drummer named Sankofa to experience slavery). At least it has a happy ending, as the remaining slaves (after some are killed or sold) attack their masters with machetes. It’s all very well-shot for an indie movie, and the actors are playing their hearts out. But Gerima is trying to make an Important Statement Here, and so the story becomes a humorless exercise in tedium.

by ·Comments Off on Metropolitan (1990, Whit Stillman)

It’s debutante season (Katy had to explain to me what that is) in Manhattan, so a group of friends home from college for the holidays get dressed up and hang out every night, mostly just the seven of them – but they pick up a “downwardly mobile” red-haired outsider named Tom early in the season and rope him into joining them for the whole two weeks of party games, dancing, jealousy and highly literate conversation.

Tom claims to be too much of a radical socialist to participate in such old-fashioned upper-class nonsense, but is easily enough convinced to buy a secondhand tuxedo and join in, especially when he finds out his ex-girlfriend Serena is a friend of the group. Molly Ringwald-looking Audrey crushes on Tom, while Charlie (a more intellectual Max Fischer) crushes on Audrey – as the others fade away over the second week, these three will remain from the core group.

Sally is the group’s host, who ends up with a gross record producer, Cynthia an easily-annoyed argument-baiter, Fred a tired guy who drinks too much then decides the group’s no fun anymore once he sobers up, and Nick the self-aggrandizing center of attention until he returns to school early. Nick’s at war with ladies’ man Rick who is currently dating Tom’s ex. Oh and there’s Jane, whom I already can’t remember.

After Tom hurts Audrey’s feelings pining after his ex, Audrey and Cynthia disappear to Rick’s house. Charlie and Tom are concerned enough for her welfare that they take a two-hour cab ride to rescue her. Audrey seems to be in no danger, but every girl likes to be rescued, so she goes with them, walking back to Manhattan talking vaguely about their futures. I kinda loved the movie, and especially the ending.

Beaten by Ghost for the screenplay oscar, Chameleon Street for best picture at sundance, and To Sleep With Anger (fair enough) for indy awards screenplay. Looks like half the cast appears in Last Days of Disco. Audrey (Carolyn Farina) was in The Age of Innocence as a relative (sister?) of Daniel Day-Lewis. Nick (Chris Eigeman) in a bunch of indie movies including Kicking and Screaming. Cynthia (Isabel Gillies) is billed just under David Lynch in the Nadja cast and Charlie (Taylor Nichols) appeared in Jurassic Park III.

L. Sante:

The dialogue is ostentatiously written; every character wields subordinate clauses and uses words like however and nevertheless. The combination of stilted speeches and deft behavioral acting sometimes seems peculiar, but it is also peculiarly apposite. Like Austen, Stillman wears his irony lightly and deploys it affectionately.
…
Urban haute bourgeoisie… is a term coined by Charlie, who is obsessed with the ongoing failure and imminent doom of his class. Stillman obviously thinks something of the sort himself—the movie’s title is subtle in its archly irrelevant grandeur, but you wonder if Twilight of the Gods didn’t cross his mind. (At one point, Tom’s bedside book is shown to be Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.)

Speaking of the low-budget resourcefulness of the movie’s production, Sante says “a picture about the rites of passage of the urban haute bourgeoisie might be expected to appear as impeccably composed as The Earrings of Madame de…“. Having just watched that film, I thought of it in a different respect. At the beginning of both movies, as we’re being introduced to the characters I groan inwardly: not another movie that expects me to care about the minor problems of privileged rich people. At the end of Madame de… the minor problems have become major and I still don’t care (actually I came to respect General Charles Boyer somewhat), but Metropolitan made me love its overeducated rich-kid protagonists.

by ·Comments Off on Beau Travail (1999, Claire Denis)

A simple story with just a few main characters, which Denis lovingly photographs, obscures and abstracts. Unlike many of her others, it’s almost immediately easy to grasp this one’s character relationships, which may account for its higher reputation than her later films, or probably it’s just this one’s timing, exploding her international festival/critical reputation. Not that I mean to be ungenerous to Beau Travail – it’s terrific, and must have one of the best film endings of the 90’s.

Based on Herman Melville’s story Billy Budd. Commandant Michael Subor (The Intruder) leads a French foreign legion camp in Djibouti. Denis Lavant (Lovers on the Bridge) is training a bunch of men. But Lavant feels that he’s losing authority to new guy Gregoire Colin (35 Shots of Rum), so he looks for an opportunity to strike back. That was my interpretation anyway, but looking through comments of other filmed versions of Billy Budd, it seems that his motivation is never quite clear. Either way, he sends Colin on a doomed hike through the desert. Presumed to have killed the recruit (we later see Colin gettin rescued), Lavant is dismissed from the armed forces and set to be court-martialed. And just when you’re wondering why cast the great Denis Lavant as an immobile authority figure, he breaks out into a crazy awesome fantasy-sequence dance.

Doesn’t seem to follow the novel’s plot too closely – in the book, Budd is executed for accidentally killing a superior officer, while here he saves a man and kills nobody. The book was turned into a famous opera, and Denis uses songs from that instead of her usual Tindersticks. Mostly, she turns the story into an abstract dance of bodies in the desert, with emotions felt rather than explained.

J. Rosenbaum:

The fact that [Subor] is named after the hero of Jean-Luc Godard’s Le petit soldat and played by the same actor almost 40 years later adds a suggestive thread… Most of all, Denis, who spent part of her childhood in Djibouti, captures the poetry and atmosphere — and, more subtly, the women — of Africa like few filmmakers before her.

by ·Comments Off on Dollman (1991, Albert Pyun)

I never especially wanted to see Dollman or Demonic Toys, but I definitely want to see Dollman vs. Demonic Toys, and you gotta start at the beginning. It’s a cheap and stupid little direct-to-video sci-fi flick, but it’s got its moments. The lead girl is introduced beating the hell out of a local drug dealer, and the hero is a tiny detective from another planet chasing down an evil disembodied head. And there are occasional moments of hilarity, some of them intentional (like the dialogue on Dollman’s home planet). Also, Dollman has angry violence issues, so there are bunches of bodies including an exploding henchman.

The floating head is Sproog, played by something called Frank Collision, the rogue alien doll man is Tim Thomerson, best known from the Trancers series, and the girl got a plum role in Born In East L.A. Jackie Earle Haley plays a henchman. Director Pyun has been “much vituperated against” according to his IMDB page.

by ·Comments Off on I Can’t Sleep (1994, Claire Denis)

Beautiful Daiga (Yekaterina Golubeva, mysterious sister/lover of Pola X) has emigrated from Lithuania to Paris and is looking for a place to stay and work. Theo (Alex Descas, father in 35 Shots of Rum) is a struggling musician, and his brother Camille (Richard Courcet) a transvestite dancer. One of these three people might be connected to the serial “Granny Killer” who has been terrorizing Paris for a while.

Theo is from Martinique, married to Mona (Beatrice Dalle of The Intruder, also an intruder in Inside). Their relationship issues provide a solid center to the murder mystery plot – turns out Camille and his lover Raphael are the wanted criminals, killing old women and robbing their apartments for money to party.

Sort of like 35 Shots of Rum, following a few characters, you gradually realize who they are and how they know each other, more grounded and straightforward than The Intruder or Trouble Every Day – only instead of ending with a wedding, it ends with two guys being locked up.

Senses of Cinema provides a handle on many of her films: “Denis continues to explore the legacy of colonial and post-colonial societies by concentrating upon shared experiences of displacement – through an ensemble of characters who are struggling to find, return to or willfully create a sense of home, possibility, passion, belonging.”

I also watched her nine-minute segment from A Propos de Nice the following year, tragically entitled Nice, Very Nice. Young Denis regular Gregoire Colin is snatched off the sidewalk by some guys he knows, given a gun and an apparently convincing speech (we don’t hear it – there’s no spoken dialogue). Colin stops at the beach to think, then heads through a parade to a restaurant, where he finds and kills his man. The plot seems like an excuse to film the parade.