by ·Comments Off on Month of 121 Shorts: Visions of Europe

Visions of Europe is a 2004 anthology film with shorts by various directors about the current state of the continent, which I’ve already started to watch earlier and still may never finish. Pretty hit or miss.

The Miracle (Martin Sulik)
An immaculate conception story, the girl’s parents and priest trying to get answers. God’s message, via the girl, “We mustn’t build tower blocks. The big ones must heed the small. We need to travel more to resist the false messiah.” Weird, kinda spooky. Not sure if the floating coffee cup at the end helped or not.
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Anna Lives In Marghera (Francesca Comencini)
Briskly edited montage of an Italian student who participates in Rage Against The Machine-soundtracked political protests and prays when she’s not working on her thesis about industrial pollution.
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Children Lose Nothing (Sharunas Bartas)
A girl collects frogs. Two boys fight over a girl. A paper boat! Finely photographed brownish little art short. Symbolic of something!
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Room For All (Constantine Giannaris)
Talking heads tell us about the immigrant experience in Greece. Giannaris just made a movie called Gender Pop – the title alone is more interesting than this.

Prologue (Béla Tarr)
Loooong black-and-white dolly shot (imagine that) with pretty music by Mihaly Vig showing hundreds of people waiting in line to get food. Tibor Takacs was one name in the credits – could it be the director of The Gate?
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Invisible State (Aisling Walsh)
A serious man in a suit tells us angrily about human trafficking. “They will tell of Irish eyes not smiling.” Walsh made a teary Aidan Quinn drama the previous year.
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Crossroad (Malgorzata Szumowska)
The adventures of a catholic cross outdoors at a crossroad. Eventually some coroners take down the classic Jesus and replace it with a blobby new plastic Jesus. Was it supposed to be funny? I found it kinda funny.
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Paris By Night (Tony Gatlif)
Immigrants on the run, one of them injured, run through the Paris streets to some good music. Jarmuschy. Same year as Gatlif’s acclaimed Exiles.
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by ·Comments Off on Suspiria (1977, Dario Argento)

An awful lot like Inferno, with the ludicrous plot, hysterical acting and silly deaths. But also like Inferno, the visuals are excellent enough that I can forgive all that. I think I actually prefer Inferno, even though this one has better music and funnier death scenes.

Eva Axén went from working with Visconti in classy period pieces to getting stabbed, thrown through windows and hung by Argento:
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Eva up there escapes from a prestigious dancing school, goes to stay with a friend, and is dramatically killed (along with the friend) by an unseen evil which cares little for logic or reasonable dialogue, only for the picturesque posed deaths of young women.

Our heroine in the middle is Jessica Harper (Phantom of the Paradise, Pennies From Heaven). At left is Stefania Casini, an older sister in Blood For Dracula.
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New student Suzy picks up the narrative from there, discovering right off the bat that her school is creepy but not figuring until the end that it’s a front for a coven of witches run by a hundreds-year-old evil mother.

The Mother Of… something:
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One thing the movie’s got going for it: casting Udo Kier. But it loses points for casting Udo Kier in a tiny, talky role, essentially letting everyone BUT Udo Kier overact. Bad call. Maybe Kier was busy in Fassbinder’s The Stationmaster’s Wife at the time.
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While Suzy has fainting spells, deals with a plague of maggots falling from the ceiling, and talks with Udo Kier and some professor (Rudolf Schündler, actor since the 30’s and director in the 50’s and 60’s, also in The Exorcist and Wenders’ Kings of the Road and The American Friend) about historical nonsense, more deaths occur. Her friend Stefania Casini is murdered by the unseen hand in a similar over-the-top manner to the first death (barbed wire, razor stabbing, nails through the eyes). And the blind pianist is kicked out of school and walks through the abandoned square at night. The music warms up, the lighting declares the buildings to be a threat, and suddenly a stone gargoyle comes alive and flies overhead… but in the end, he’s simply killed by his guide dog.

Blind Daniel (Flavio Bucci of Il Divo) getting kicked out of school by mistress Alida Valli (star of Eyes Without a Face, Senso, Il Grido, The Third Man, played a caretaker in Inferno)
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Joan Bennett (30+ years after Scarlet Street), in her final film role, has got some wicked wallpaper.
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Amazing cinematography by Luciano Tovoli (from Antonioni to Argento to Barbet Schroeder to Titus), who shines red and blue colored lights on simply everything. The dubbing is mostly good, and I liked the pumping Goblin music surprisingly well. I dig when Goblin sings along quietly with a sinister “la la la.”

Argento’s debut seven years prior was titled The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.
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OCT 2017: watched the new 4k restoration at the Alamo, wowie wow wow.

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“Count Dracula may not seem like the ideal husband. … Of course he’s deadly pale, but then he’s a vegetarian and they all seem to look like that.”

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The director admits the film is slow, even uses the word “boring,” but says they figured it’d be more poetic that way. He also claims little familiarity with the original Dracula story and vampire mythology, but says he’d try to respect it whenever a crew member would point it out (“hey Paul, Drac can’t walk out in sunlight like that”).

On the plus side, it has very nice piano music, decent well-lit cinematography by Luigi Kuveiller (who shot Avanti! and is as fond of zooms as Brian De Palma), Udo Kier acting off his nut, a humorous array of atrocious accents, and the longest blood-vomiting scene I’ve ever watched. Morrissey’s got the right idea about horror movies drawing in the viewer through slow buildup, but he misses the creepy horror atmosphere. Udo Kier’s Dracula is a pale weakling who gets ordered around by his enthusiastic German servant (Arno Juerging) and is eventually, humiliatingly killed by a loser rapist houseboy wielding an axe. Without the horror, or the over-the-top 3D humor of Flesh For Frankenstein, this one just sorta drags along.

Arno Juerging with Maxime McKendry:
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Dracula is sent from Romania to Italy to find virgins, since Romania is fresh out. Stays at a house run by the shabby, formerly wealthy couple of Maxime McKendry (seems like the best actress here, but never in another film) and the great Vittorio De Sica, below.

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Drac is interested in the family’s four girls and tries to figure which is a virgin so he can drink her bl… I mean marry her. Unfortunately, the oldest two are having kinky sex regularly with beefcake houseboy Joe Dallesandro (Rivette’s Merry-Go-Round, a hitman in The Limey), the middle one has been engaged before so Drac writes her off (turns out she’s still a virgin so Joe kindly rapes her to save her from becoming vampire food) and the youngest is 14 (so unmarryable, but Drac is chasing her at the end).

Milena Vukotic:
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Stefania Casini (Suspiria, a hitwoman in Bad, 1900, Belly of an Architect):
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Not pictured: Fellini/Bunuel/Tarkovsky actress Milena Vukotic, and youngest Silvia Dionisio. It was a bitch to figure out the above screenshots since all four sisters look the same. See comment below for some clarification/corrections (thanks Jenna).

“What about your sister? What does she do all night? I’d like to rape the hell out of her.” “She’s only 14!”

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The reason I watched this in the first place, kicking off an early start to SHOCKtober on the 29th, is Roman Polanski. During all the controversy while he sits in a Swiss jail I thought I’d watch myself a RoPol movie, but I can’t find my copy of Knife in the Water so I went for this instead. Apparently Udo Kier needed to take a day off for reshoots on another film, so they hurriedly wrote a scene in which Arno Juerging gets scammed by Roman (on left with the mustache) in a tavern.

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Udo is as fun to watch as always (well, maybe less fun than always), but he’s surrounded by the usual sordid 70’s misogyny of a Morrissey/Warhol production. Dracula comes to a sad end, limbs all chopped off like the Black Knight and then staked by the gross houseboy. Better luck next time…

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by ·Comments Off on Night On Earth (1991, Jim Jarmusch)

Opening titles: we hear a nice Tom Waits song (the soundtrack is great overall) and see “JVC PRESENTS.” Didn’t JVC used to make blank tapes? The kind that weren’t even as good as Maxell?

Five segments in five cities. Has cute parts, and I guess it’s part of the greater Jarmusch body of work or whatever, but also kinda feels like something that could’ve safely stayed in 1991 (or maybe ’93; it was ahead of its time). What’s funny is that it doesn’t seem like the kind of movie that should get easily dated (except through the usual – fashions, cars, mobile phones – only period pieces are immune to those) but it has this early 90’s aura about it, like Smoke or a Hal Hartley movie, which I don’t see in Dead Man or Down By Law or Mystery Train. Maybe it’s just Winona Ryder. Anyway this remains my least favorite Jarmusch picture, though I did enjoy it overall. If you could break it up Coffee & Cigarettes-style, it’d be nice to lead from New York straight into Helsinki, and maybe add Rome every third or fourth viewing.

LA: Winona Ryder is a midget phonebook-sitting wannabe-mechanic driving fancypants cellphone-calling casting agent Gena Rowlands home from the airport. Gena’s client is looking for a tough young girl, an unknown, so predictably she propositions Winona, who turns Gena down. Jim says it’s the first movie Gena agreed to do after John Cassavetes died. I never made it past this segment when I first tried to watch Night On Earth a decade ago… pixie Winona is too hard to take as a street tough.

NY: East German Armin Mueller-Stahl (same year he did Soderbergh’s Kafka) is new to New York and cab driving, so passenger Giancarlo Esposito takes over, picking up sister-in-law Rosie Perez for a miniature Do The Right Thing reunion, wide-eyed Armin taking it all in.

Paris: Isaach De Bankolé (stolen from Claire Denis) kicks out some diplomats, picks up a blind girl (Beatrice Dalle, star of Time of the Wolf, also a Claire Denis regular) and asks her a bunch of dunderheaded questions.

Rome: Roberto Benigni picks up a priest, drives like a madman (but there’s no traffic so it’s cool) visits a couple transvestites, and tells horribly perverted stories until the priest dies after dropping his meds on the floor and Roberto quietly unloads him on a park bench.

Helsinki: Cabbie picks up three guys from a hard night on the town. Of course all four of them have been in Kaurismaki films (one of the passengers played Polonius in Hamlet Goes Business. They tell their drunk friend’s hard luck story and the cabbie replies with his own hard luck story. Way to end your movie on a dead baby tale there, Jim.

Nice color cinematography by Frederick Elmes (a Lynch regular who later shot Broken Flowers) – not seen here cuz it was a rental and I forgot to get screen shots.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched July 2009

Koko’s Earth Control (1928, Dave Fleischer)
Koko the Clown walks the planet with his dog until they find the Earth Control station. The dog willfully and maliciously pulls the end-of-the-world switch and then acts all panicked when the world begins to end. What did he think would happen? Fun mix of live-action (tilt camera while people pretend to fall to the side, the dog skittering atop an animation table) and animation (earthquakes, volcanoes, the sun melts the moon).
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Dutch Bird (2004, Kirk Weddell)
Ridiculous comedy – old man is sad and alone, so his friends convince him to go out again by pranking him with a story about drugged racing pigeons. On my TV the color was way off, which was really the main interest in the movie. In the below shot, everyone had green skin against a pinkish sky. It was eerie – as the 20 minutes stretched on and on, I liked to imagine that green-faced aliens had gotten a hold of The Full Monty and Waking Ned Devine and were producing Brit-com films of their own. Sadly, getting screenshots on my PC the color turned out normal.
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Tale of Tales (1979, Yuri Norshteyn)
At least two jury competitions have named this the greatest animated film of all time. It is really good, but we all wished it’d been half its 30 minute length, and its symbolism was extremely obvious. Not that I ever get less-than-obvious symbolism, so that’s not something I ought to complain about. Wild Things are playing jump rope and a little dog kidnaps a baby, and there’s war and peace and what not. Supposedly the director has been working on his film of Gogol’s The Overcoat ever since – for 30 years. He must be the Jeff Mangum of Russian animated films.
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Harpy (1978, Raoul Servais)
Kind of an absurd, funnier Tales from the Darkside episode. Guy saves a poor harpy from being beaten to death by an angry man and takes it home. But it keeps eating and eating and making his life hell. Finally it eats his legs off when he tries to escape, so he attempts to beat it to death, it gets saved by another man, etc. Same ending as Argento’s Jenifer, then. Mostly appealing for the crazy harpy visuals. The Belgian director has also made films called Siren and Pegasus, must find those sometime.
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Grasshoppers (1990, Bruno Bozzetto)
Cute, no-frills cartoon that looked like something out of Mad Magazine. Civilization rises out of the grass only to fight war after war after war, represented by a few dudes at a time, not by whole armies. The kind of thing that would’ve played on O Canada if it wasn’t Italian.
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Out of Print (2008, Danny Plotnick)
A dude yearns for the days when cult movies were actually rare and you could only get crappy unwatchable dubbed versions if you knew a guy who knew a guy. As someone who enjoys being able to see cult movies easily and in relatively good quality, I don’t see the dude’s point.
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World Cinema (2007, Joel Coen)
Llewelyn from No Country stops at an arthouse movie theater playing Rules of the Game and Climates. Gets advice from the ticket guy, watches Climates and likes it. Having seen Climates myself I’m not sure this is too realistic. Also not sure why it was cut from the DVD of To Each His Cinema.
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by ·Comments Off on Avanti! (1972, Billy Wilder)

Not the last film by Billy Wilder, though it feels like someone’s last film – he later made two Lemmon/Matthau comedies and a William Holden drama.

Katy disagreed with the romantic comedy term, saying just because a few funny things happen doesn’t mean it’s a comedy, and suggests the term dramedy as a solution. Long, static master shots are probably praised to the heavens by the critics responsible for landing this on the TSP1000 list for being elegant, masterfully composed, or god forbid, “rigorous”. I found that it sucked energy away from a too-slow movie, which was already disappointing for not being a comedy as advertised. That’ll teach me to trust the IMDB genre listings.

One of multiple chances to see Jack Lemmon naked:
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Okay, so it is a comedy, it’s just not very funny. Jack Lemmon travels to a vacation resort in Italy to pick up his father who died in a car crash and he meets Juliet Mills (mostly a TV actress, but she’d starred in a British comedy film a decade earlier) who is there to pick up her mother who died in the same crash. Jack is acting like a terrible, entitled jerk American but Juliet finally manages to corner him and tell him that their parents were having an annual affair at this hotel. It’s only a matter of time before she softens Jack and begins carrying on their parents’ affair with him – not that she does much besides smile and look like she’s having a great time. Oh, and there’s a half-hearted side plot when the Trotta family whose grapevines were destroyed by the car crash steal the bodies for ransom.

The Trotta family:
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The hotel maid is your typical fiery, hot-tempered, lovestruck movie Italian woman – she kills her husband (boyfriend?) for plotting to leave her, so when a U.S. government man shows up to help Jack, acting like the asshole Jack had been seventy minutes prior, Jack gives the guy a coffin with the dead Italian in it, and he and Juliet bury their parents together in Italy. It’s actually kinda sweet. “Avanti!” we learn at the beginning means “come in!” for door-knocking servants and hotel personnel, and inevitably for our romantic couple.

A big deal is made of Juliet being overweight:
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Carlucci, who runs the hotel and makes sure Lemmon has everything he needs, was played by Clive Revill, a New Zealander in a fake mustache who went on to voice the Emperor in Empire Strikes Back. Crude American diplomat Edward Andrews’ final role was in Gremlins. And at least one of the vineyard Trotta family was in a Fellini movie.

Carlucci with Jack:
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Set over one year in the mid-to-late 30’s, mostly follows high-school-aged Titta and his family but leaves breathing room for the rest of the town and its inhabitants. The rare ensemble movie that gives everyone a memorably distinct identity without resorting to stereotyping.

On one hand, it would be worth renting the Criterion DVD and poring over the hours of extras. On the other hand, there’s no outside explanation needed for Amarcord. Need to watch this again and again… I’m pretty sure Katy would like it.

The title is slangy for “I Remember.”

I can’t account for why this won an oscar one year (best foreign film) and was nominated for more oscars (writing, directing) the following year.

I always think of “fascism” as a bad word, an insult thrown at your government by foreigners, forgetting that once Italians were screaming their support of fascism in the streets. Nutty buggers.

I don’t think this was packed with movie stars. Red temptress Magali Noël had been in Satyricon, Titta’s mom would appear in Cinema Paradiso 15 years later, and mad uncle Teo would direct a parody of The Exorcist.

So, another great Fellini film, combining the circus-film group atmosphere of 8 1/2 with touches of the tragedy of La Strada, with fortunately no La Dolce Vita influence to be found. I didn’t let the dubbing get me down, but I’d thought a new print of a new restoration of an only 30-year-old film would have more vibrant color than it did.

by ·Comments Off on The Fall (2006, Tarsem Singh)

Tarsem’s previous movie The Cell had a crappy story and bad acting wrapped around a handful of intensely cool but disconnected imagery. This one has a simple but decent story and good acting, with about half the movie being intensely cool imagery, finely intertwined with the rest of the plot. A quantum leap forward!

The gimmick of not having a gimmick (no digital effects, etc) was distracting as hell. We were always “what country do you think that is” or “THAT isn’t a real place is it” or “aha, that’s GOT to be a digital effect” or “is the little girl acting or not, she seems so natural.” From online trivia we learn it’s a remake of a 1981 Bulgarian film and the little girl was often improvising.

Movie itself is a wonder. In Princess Bride’s framing story, grandpa Peter Falk is reading a great, classic storybook, so the bulk movie has to be great and classic, and it lives up – but in The Fall we have an unreliable narrator, suicidal, heartbroken, wasted on morphine, making it up as he goes along. In a sense this makes the story more unpredictable, but it’s also a huge cop-out because if the writing is poor you can say “oh it’s supposed to be poor, didn’t you get that?” And it is kinda poor. Our hero the masked bandit with his lost love and archnemesis kinda fizzles, and his side characters Luigi (“explosives expert” who only uses explosives once, suicidally at the very end), The Ex-Slave and The Indian just make poses and look beautiful against the exotic scenery, getting shown up by the problem-solving Charles Darwin and his pet monkey. So it doesn’t sound too good and it’s probably not, but if you’re gonna throw out images this nice, I’ll let your thin plot slide. Carried over from The Cell we’ve still got some nightmarish imagery too. When their guide The Mystic is captured, being chopped to death with an axe (barely offscreen), crying and repeating the safe word “googly googly”, small birds flying out of his mouth, that’s a thing that gets stuck terribly in my head while I’m trying to sleep.

Movie ends with a montage of Keaton and Chaplin stunt scenes, half of which I recognized, in a belated homage to stunt men (our hero is one, ended up in the hospital with the little girl by falling badly off a bridge). Weird. Nobody I’ve heard of in the cast, which makes sense. If you’re shooting a self-financed movie over four years in 20+ countries, you’re not gonna get many recognizable actors to sign up. However, Lee Pace (our storytelling hero) is now starring in Pushing Daisies.

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I didn’t know anything about Samuel Beckett or existentialism, but I’m going to assume from this movie that they involve repetition, jokes, dry absurdism, ponderings on the meaning of life and existence of God, and repetition. The movie’s contributions would be black-and-white photography of wonderful, stark locations – seaside, desert and long, long roads – long shots with blackouts between scenes, and lots of random dance music.

Our heroes are Freak (a former punk rock singer) and Jaja (ex coma patient with drug and family problems). They get driven around by a heavily bearded dude named Agent Zero Six, talk with the Karaoke-loving Oracle, watch a performance by Adam and Eve (and her secret lesbian lover), and finally get killed on the beach trying to swim with a sexy naked lady – the only scene in color.

That color scene, with a stripe of blood through the ocean, looked even more spectacular than the rest of the movie… but spectacularness is relative, since the Atlanta Film Festival was playing us some kinda letterboxed blurry video. IMDB says it was shot in Super 16 and printed to 35mm, so why can’t we get a film print? Expense? Why throw a film festival if you’re not gonna play films? Format complaints aside, great movie and a nice start to the fest.