by ·Comments Off on Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988, Charlotte Zwerin)

Really good rock doc, because the talking heads feel like punctuations to the flow of music instead of vice-versa. Like most movies, it is 90 minutes long when it could be LP-length, but say la vee. A musician’s musician, impenetrable as a person, at least in the movies I’ve seen. I first heard him in another doc, his mouth wide open, playing technically-imperfect tunes, immediately striking, a true jazz weirdo. That movie’s archive footage was shot in 1969, this one’s in 1967, both released decades later.

Paul Grimstad for Criterion:

From the [1967] Blackwood footage, interspersed with other archival film, photographs, new interviews, and narration, Zwerin distilled an hour-and-a-half-long structure not all that different from a Monk composition: jumpy, elliptical, catchy, moving … As a counterpoint to the archival material, Zwerin shot new footage of pianists Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris (both Detroit natives, like Zwerin) playing through Monk tunes as four-hand duets. We see how much fun they’re having, how generous and congenial their sharing of the music is, and how a Monk song like “Well, You Needn’t” allows for endless elaboration without its melodic outline ever becoming blurred.

by ·Comments Off on Inventory: Criterion 51-100

That’s the first hundred now.
A good batch, came out summer 1999 to summer 2001.

Movies I’ve written up here, roughly ranked:

Do The Right Thing
Vagabond
Brazil
For All Mankind
Black Narcissus
Cleo From 5 to 7
The Passion of Joan of Arc
The Blood of a Poet
Written on the Wind
Kwaidan
I Know Where I’m Going!
Orpheus
Sisters
L’Avventura
Peeping Tom
Autumn Sonata
The 39 Steps
Sanjuro
Alexander Nevsky
Good Morning
Brief Encounter
Variety Lights
W.C. Fields: 6 Short Films
Testament of Orpheus
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Pygmalion
The Harder They Come
The Bank Dick
And God Created Woman
The Blob
Hamlet
The Night Porter
The Magic Flute

Watched in the pre-blog dark days, ranked by how urgently I need to revisit:

Ivan The Terrible, Parts 1 & 2
Charade
Yojimbo
The Element of Crime
All That Heaven Allows
The Last Temptation of Christ
Fiend Without a Face
Rushmore
The Life of Brian
Le Million
The Third Man
Carnival of Souls
Beastie Boys Anthology
Gimme Shelter
Chasing Amy

Bonus Features:

Good Morning includes the equally great feature I Was Born, But… and extras by three of the greats (Rosenbaum, Cairns, Bordwell)

Back in my Gilliam-obsessive days I watched every cut of Brazil, saw all the extras, read the Jack Mathews book, and played at least one of those Life of Brian commentaries.

Enjoyed the 39 Steps commentary on a plane. Rented the OG disc of Carnival of Souls and dutifully watched all the industrial shorts. Seen everything on The Third Man and Rushmore. Didn’t love The Blob commentary, and don’t recall if I heard the Fiend Without a Face.

Ate up the Varda extras, which include the shorts The Story of an Old Lady and the very great L’Opera Mouffe.

I’ve probably seen quite enough about Powell and Pressburger by now, but Return to the Edge of the World was great and I wouldn’t mind catching the Mark Cousins doc.

Should go through the For All Mankind and Kurosawa extras sometime. Sirk too, though I recently saw Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, included on the All That Heaven Allows disc.

Bought Autumn Sonata but probably won’t ever get to the extended making-of features, and definitely won’t revisit the Magic Flute doc – the Fanny & Alexander extras look more enticing.

I have a feeling the Women of the Resistance doc will be more interesting than The Night Porter. The David Lean doc might be good. Watched the Lars Tranceformer doc back in the day and didn’t love it, but the other Element of Crime features look intriguing.

Love Cocteau’s Villa Santo Sospir, not sure how I missed the Edgardo Cozarinsky documentary.

Got the Eisenstein box and went through it all, but the Ivans need revisiting and we really need a Nevsky reissue with properly-recorded orchestral score.

Watched everything I could find on Do The Right Thing and read Spike’s making-of book which is even better than the audio/video extras.

Did watch the L’Avventura doc and commentary, while trying to understand what art cinema is – an experience I’d recommend to anyone.

Beastie Boys Anthology remains the most well-authored DVD I ever bought.

If western civilization survives long enough I’ll probably explore the next fifty – got ten left to watch, including some (Shinoda, the Czechs) I really want to see, and I’ve already got the annoying ones out of the way (Ruling Class, The Hidden Fortress).

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 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 Scarface (1932, Howard Hawks)

Guess I watched an old disc when the 4k remaster is right around the corner, oops. Big showy camera moves in an early sound film, impressive. A good start towards dialogue based cinema, also a cavalcade of atrocious accents. It’s the Ferrari Theory, or just typically Italian: the accents can be as random as you want if the picture is on point. Ben Hecht (and maybe an uncredited Hawks) had written one of the great silent gangster movies Underworld, then after Little Caesar and Public Enemy started a craze, they came back to claim their throne.

Rich party thrower Louis is shot dead, Paul “Scarface” Muni was supposed to be his bodyguard. Scarf’s new boss is Johnny Lobo (Osgood Perkins, grandfather/namesake of the Longlegs director). During Johnny’s rise to the top, Scarface kills all their competition except dapper Boris Karloff, then comes for him too, then kills his own boss and steals his girl Karen Morley. But Scarf is also overprotective of his sister Ann Dvorak, and after he catches her with his prize henchman George Raft, the siblings have got nobody left but each other, and go out in a hail of bullets.

Scarfie having a moment with his sister:

Mabel has parrots:

by ·Comments Off on Brief Encounters (1967, Kira Muratova)

Muratova plays a local government official who hires Nina Ruslanova (of Khrustalyov, My Car! two decades later) as a maid. At other times they’ve both been in love with Vladimir Vysotsky. Psychologically true and beautiful drama. Nervous cutting between timelines, solid within each particular time and place. If this had been widely seen, the cold war would’ve not gone down the way it did.

by ·Comments Off on Blast of Silence (1961, Allen Baron)

“They all hate the gun they hire.” Second-person narrator, unusually well-written, puts us in hit man Frankie’s shoes as he gets a Christmastime job to kill a mustache guy with two bodyguards. First he has to deal with Ralph the beardo gun salesman (later of Shock Corridor). He goes to old flame Lori’s house on xmas (she’s Matt Dillon’s mom in The Flamingo Kid) but has no idea how to behave with a lady. Our killer is an out of towner, only knows 2 or 3 people in NYC but keeps bumping into them – this could have been easily avoidable by switching up his patterns. He gets his man, but messily, and doesn’t escape the city. Writer/director/star Baron went on to direct episodes of every 1970s TV show.

by ·Comments Off on Le Samourai (1967, Jean-Pierre Melville)

I misremembered this as being more similar to Ghost Dog, which I also need to rewatch soon, but hopefully not as a memorial screening. For all his alibi setup, when Delon gets to the club he acts extremely suspicious and everyone notices him. Rounded up with some other suspects, he gets off because pianist Cathy Rosier says he’s not the man. Then his contract guys try to kill him, he goes in for revenge, then foolishly goes to see the girl again, where cop Heurtebise has set a trap.

Even when wounded and on the run, always take time to feed the birds:

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China IV (1993, Yuen Bun)

Pre-credits scene has Vincent Zhao making some very un-Jet-Li awesome moves, then his name is splashed across the screen – good, they’re not trying to hide the new guy. It’s also the first sequel to start directly after the previous one – they’re still celebrating the end of the Lion King festival when friendly Governor Zhiwen Wang (currently of the Infernal Affairs TV series) shows up and they lion-dance together.

Foon, Clubfoot, and Yan are back in the mix, but 13th Aunt is replaced by (Katy guessed it) 14th Aunt: Jean Wang of Swordsman III and Iron Monkey the same year. New director Yuen doesn’t exactly revitalize the series here. The dubbing is bad, and despite having a subplot about a group using wires to appear to fly, the movie itself is full of unintentionally visible wires, especially in the heinous horse-punching scenes (yes, there’s more than one).

14th Aunt starts a newspaper but nobody in town knows how to read – so, technologically we’ve moved from still photography to motion pictures to the printing press. Anti-foreigner sword cult Red Lantern is menacing everyone, and the foreigners have equipped their lion suits with deadly weapons. The nice governor dies, it’s very sad, then Wong takes a measured bit of revenge before withdrawing to prep for the final(?) movie.

Chin Ka-Lok is angry, I’ve forgotten why:

Ze Germans: