by ·Comments Off on Santa Sangre (1989, Alejandro Jodorowsky)

This was pretty incredible. Nude man in asylum thinks he’s a monkey. Flashback to when he was a young boy in a false mustache in the circus, watching a tattooed hottie force a deaf-mute girl to walk a burning tightrope. The boy’s mom is chief priestess at the santa sangre temple, which is torn down after being disavowed by the church, claiming the armless woman they worship is not a saint. Later she catches her awful drunken husband with the tattooed lady, and he cuts off her arms then kills himself, and the young mime tightrope walker is driven away from the traumatized boy.

Then after that first 45 minutes, the unthinkable happens: the movie got boring. Later I changed my mind about this, figure it just changed mood and speed and I wasn’t able to follow along, because retracing the story through the million screenshots I took, it sure doesn’t look boring. Anyway, now the boy and his armless mom have a stage act where he hides behind her, being her arms, imagining himself invisible. A bunch of people, including the tattooed woman and a cross-dressing wrestler, get brutally murdered – mother commanding son to kill with his/her hands. He hooks up with his midget best friend from the circus, who may have never existed. Only when he finds the mime girl does he stand up to his mother (and stab her to death), then he and the girl walk outside to start a new life together. No just kidding – they walk outside to find themselves surrounded by police.

Too old to play the young lead himself, Alejandro has his son Axel play the lead, with younger son Adan as young Axel, Blanca Guerra (also in Walker) as his mother and Guy “Dean’s brother” Stockwell as his father. It’s possibly the most coherent Jodorowsky movie I’ve seen, a true horror bursting with ideas and excellently filmed. I hope all the dead or dying animals were just special-effects this time.

D. Lim (who also makes a howler mistake, calling La Cravate a lost film years after it was rediscovered and issued on DVD):

Psycho is hardly the only cinematic influence on Santa Sangre. The circus grotesquerie suggests Fellini, though Tod Browning’s big-top movies Freaks and The Unknown are perhaps even more relevant. James Whale’s The Invisible Man is glimpsed on the television at one point. Also apparent is the lurid imprint of the film’s producer and co-writer Claudio Argento, brother of schlock-horror maestro Dario. But for all its sundry inspirations, Santa Sangre never seems derivative. Jodorowsky’s anything-goes alchemy has a cumulative power, as does the documentary energy of his location photography. It’s a movie bursting with life — interrupted frequently by processions and pageants, shot in actual slums and red-light districts.

You can’t tell from the dim screenshot that this is a white bird rising from an open grave:

by ·Comments Off on Under The Volcano (1984, John Huston)

Wanted to check out some more late Huston before the upcoming Emory screening of The Dead, since I don’t believe Wise Blood is typical of his films. But now, having seen these two plus The Maltese Falcon and nothing in between, I still have no idea what is typical of his films. It’s got that familiar 1970’s grime all over it, so either Huston was late in adapting to 80’s-style cinema or, more likely, Mexico was still in the 70’s.

“Some things you can’t apologize for.”

“Hell is my natural habitat.”

Full of fun quotes, mostly spoken by literate drunk Albert Finney, who gave up sobriety when his wife left a year prior. Finney (a few years before Miller’s Crossing) is tended by his brother Hugh (Anthony Andrews, lately of The King’s Speech), and all is depressingly normal until the now-ex-wife (Jacqueline Bisset, the mother in The Ceremony) shows up unexpectedly. Finney goes off the deep end with the drinking and erratic behavior, ending up shot to death in a hostile bar/whorehouse, scaring a horse into trampling to death his wife in front of Hugh, with whom she’d been having an affair before she originally left Mexico. It’s a great ending to a movie which overall didn’t strike me as hard as it seems to strike everyone else.

Finney and Bisset:

Andrews spontaneously goes bullfighting:

Didn’t watch the many DVD extras so I still know nothing about author Malcolm Lowry. Alex North brings his heavy hand to the proceedings, not offending except once during a comedy scene when he got overexcited. Shot with Mexican D.P. Gabriel Figueroa, who worked on at least four of Bunuel’s best films.

C. Viviani makes connections to The Dead:

It was with The Man Who Would Be King (1975), a project that he had been thinking about since the 1950s—based on a Rudyard Kipling story—that Huston made his return to literary adaptation. After the success of that bold “action-adventure” (in which both the action and the adventure are more within the characters than on the screen), Huston began favoring fictional works that were problematic, in terms of translating them to screen, because of the importance given to internal monologue or their absence of action. In less than ten years Huston would adapt three stories considered to be “unadapt-able”: Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor, Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, and The Dead, by James Joyce. In each case the adaptation rose to the challenge by deliberately ignoring false problems and by choosing to render the spirit rather than the letter of the original. It was not a matter of filming everything but of filming only what Huston liked, which is, in fact, a constant throughout his work. The culmination of this approach, The Dead (1987), is a film that is both respectful and free, and it became a kind of legacy work, in which Huston does not so much film Joyce’s story as use it as a pretext for offering his daughter Anjelica and his son Tony the gift of his artistic heritage.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts from the last few months

The Wrong Trousers (1993, Nick Park)
Endlessly amusing, and full of curious references to unknown kinds of cheese. The baddie is a jailbroken diamond-snatching chicken with a rubber-glove rooster hat and some electrical skills. Some serious dejected Gromit sadness when the tenant chicken takes his place and he leaves home… why must funny cartoons also make me sad?

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Dizzy Dishes (1930, Dave Fleischer)
A Bluto-type orders roast duck, but our blandly Bosko-like hero dances around the kitchen instead of preparing the meal professionally. He makes a half-hearted attempt to serve the duck (shaved – not roasted) when he’s distracted yet again by a dog-eared proto-Betty Boop, leaving Bluto so hungry that he eats the dishes and table (see also: Jan Svankmajer’s Food). Finally Bosko, a true villain, assaults the poor customer and leaves with the dancing girl.

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Direction of an Actor by Jean Renoir (1968, Gisele Braunberger)
What to do when your father is a famed film producer? Hire Jean Renoir to give you acting lessons. Gisele is told to read lines to Renoir completely flat with no hint of affectation, and he stops her many times if he detects even a hint of predetermined acting style, saying that first she must read the lines bringing nothing to the table, and then the character’s voice will come from the lines. Sounds like good advice. I watched this short doc thinking it was connected to the ones Rivette made with similar titles, but I guess not. Shot by Edmond Richard (Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise, Welles’ The Trial) – can’t see how exactly it counts as a film by Giselle, but I guess it was her idea.

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The next four are from Revolución (2010), a Mexican omnibus film that I didn’t finish watching when it was briefly available online.

La Bienvenida (Fernando Eimbcke)
Armancio the tuba player sacrifices all his family time practicing for the big welcome song, then the guest of honor never shows. All the other orchestra members go home but the tuba stays and plays his rehearsed part solo for nobody. Non-moving camera, low lighting, black and white. It must be a comedy, since tubas indicate comedy, but why am I not laughing? True, the final shot was nice.

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Beautiful and Beloved (Patricia Riggen)
A dying man’s wish to his U.S.-born daughter is that he be buried in Mexico, where she’s never been. There’s talk of selling her grandfather’s pistol from the Mexican Revolution for funeral expenses, but instead she gets a deal by sleeping with some sleazy guy, which I believe is seen as a victory for the revolution.

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Lucio (Gael Garcia Bernal)
Lucio’s weird cousin comes to visit, refuses to participate in religious rituals and removes the christ-on-a-cross from the bedroom wall saying he doesn’t believe in images. Lucio has some sort of epiphany from all this, as seen by his running to the top of a mountain and gazing at the horizon.

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The Hanging Priest (Amat Escakanate)
A couple of kids (who say they’re engaged to be married even though they’re ten – is that a Mexican thing?) come across a priest in the desert. They share their water, walk for a while, and end up at a McDonald’s.

by ·Comments Off on Brainiac: The Baron of Terror (1962, Chano Urueta)

I didn’t set out to watch Brainiac: The Baron of Terror – nobody does. But these blog posts don’t write themselves. Sometimes when I’m sitting and writing about horror movies, I wish I was simply watching more horror movies, so I’ll half-watch some half-assed movie while writing. I doubt this one even makes it up to quarter-assed, so I’ll be brief.

Is this set in Spain, or did the Spanish Inquisition make it to Mexico? Very promising opening: in 1661 the Baron, who has magical powers to release himself from his chains (so, why doesn’t he simply escape the inquisitor?) is sentenced to burn, swears he’ll take his revenge in 300 years. Not a bad looking movie (except for a ludicrous optical effect of a comet) or story. But then comes the revenge, wherein the Baron puts on a silly hairy rubber mask with a long plastic tongue and puts his hands on his victims’ shoulders until they fall down. Supposedly he is sucking out their brains with the evil tongue, which he then stores in a canister and eats when needs some quick energy. At the end our hero discovers the canister, and I figure he’ll chuck it against a wall and the Baron will lose his magic, but instead two guys with flamethrowers bust in and torch the Baron – didn’t see that coming.

Heroes: Rubén Rojo of King of Kings and Rosa María Gallardo of Los secretos del sexo débil

A few translation problems: the grand inquisitor accuses the Baron of using spells “for clumsy and dishonest purposes,” and later an astronomer states “This is the most interesting thing about what I am telling you.” From the director of Blue Demon vs. The Infernal Brains (the guy had a thing for brains) and starring the movie’s own producer as the Baron.

by ·Comments Off on Buñuel In Mexico double-feature

Susana (1951)

Big, obvious drama with overbearing music and vaguely supernatural elements. Not as excitingly Bunuelian as I would’ve liked, but way better than Gran Casino.

Susana (Rosita Quintana, who was still acting in 2005, if IMDB is to be believed) is locked in solitary at the sanitarium for misbehaving, in the company of rats and an awesomely fake-looking rubber bat; begs God for mercy and the jail bars come loose. Not as impressive as in The Rapture, but it’ll do. She crashes at the first place she finds, a peaceful ranch, and gets herself in with the family to wreak havoc from within.

Susana with ranch-hand Jesus: Víctor Manuel Mendoza, who went on to appear in some Hollywood westerns:

Felicia the maid doesn’t trust Susana from the start (her line, about the storm outside, “it seems there’s a demon loose out there” comes right as Susana’s face appears in the window), but Susana seduces all the men in the house: Jesus, Don Guadelupe (Fernando Soler, star of El Gran Calavera and Daughter of Deceit around the same time) and bookish son Alberto. Actually it doesn’t seem like she seduces Jesus, it more seems that he’s a slimy rapist stalker, but I’ll take the movie’s word for it. Dona Carmen, the woman of the house, eventually realizes what’s going on and joins the maid in trying to eject the interloper – but is it too late? Another rainstorm scene where S. brushes her hair in the window in silhouette while all three men watch her from different positions. Susana confronts Dona Carmen and says if Guadelupe is forced to choose, he’ll choose Susana. Jesus is kicked out of the house: one less rival for Don Guad’s affection. Finally the cops catch up with Susana and take her away, Jesus is hired back, and Don Guad’s prize horse, which had been sick since the initial storm, miraculously recovers.

Susana and Alberto hide in the well:

Very decent acting and cinematography (Jose Ortiz Ramos, who later shot the classics Brainiac: Baron of Terror and Samson vs. the Vampire Women). Bunuel likes to shoot Susana’s legs, incl. one weird scene where Jesus breaks the eggs she’s holding and they run all down her legs.

NY Times: “Though the movie means to be steamy, Bunuel is apparently more amused than shocked by Susana’s brazen ambition and the no-nonsense way she goes about her conquests. Toward the end, when the traffic in and out of Susana’s bedroom is fairly heavy, the movie has the manner of a grandly operatic farce.”

Deleuze says some quizzical shit about “the intrinsic qualities of the possible object.” I don’t know what that means, but three different sites I checked called this Bunuel’s worst movie (or his “most unspectacular” or “fairly insignificant”) – have they never seen Gran Casino?

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Ensayo de un crimen (Rehearsal for a Crime), or,
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955)

It’s the Mexican Revolution! Little Archibaldo’s mother acts like it’s a huge inconvenience that her theater date has been canceled because the revolution has arrived in town. Archie, alone with the nanny, wishes upon a music box for the nanny’s death and she’s immediately killed by a stray bullet through the window. Years later a grown Archie (Wuthering Heights star Ernesto Alonso) is threatening nuns with a razor when one runs down the hall and falls down an open elevator shaft. The movie carries on like this, Archie indirectly causing people’s deaths or not causing them at all, and thinking he’s got some unholy power via the magic music box, which he reacquires as an adult, buying it out from under a cute girl.

Archibaldo in triplicate with his killer razor:

Lavinia glimpsed through a wall of flame:

The cute girl, Lavinia (Miroslava, who killed herself before the movie was released) becomes wealthy Archibaldo’s full-time fascination. He buys a mannequin made in her image (she models for artists) and poses it around his house, then watches it melt in his kiln (he’s a part-time sculptor) when she angers him. Having taken his revenge on the fake Lavinia, he proposes to pretty young innocent Carlotta – but she has been seeing a guy named Alejandro. Archie’s revenge-fantasies kick in again (shades of fellow murder-comedy Unfaithfully Yours) and he dreams of shooting the cheating woman dead in their marital bed after the wedding… but Alejandro shows up to the wedding and shoots her instead.

Cut to framing-device authority figure (was it a psychiatrist or an officer of the law?) who says he can’t lock Archie up for dreaming people dead. Archie seems bummed that he isn’t believed to have done anything wrong, but runs into Lavinia, the girl who survived his wrath, and walks happily away with her.

Legs of the nanny:

Leg of the dummy (Tristana, anyone):

I wasn’t expecting a lot after Susana, but this was excellent. V. Canby in the NY Times agrees. “The sight of the boring, but very pretty, governess lying dead on the carpet, her skirts in a tangle around her upper thighs, makes a lasting impression on the boy, who thereafter goes through life confusing love, death and sexuality. … Archibaldo is a very polite, considerate and wise nut, aware of almost everything except that he is the inevitable (in Buñuel’s view) product of religious and sexual repression.”

Carlotta in her final moments:

by ·1 Comment

As far as movies about fat, opaque, dull-witted men with menial jobs in alienated cities who eventually turn to crime and suicide, I suppose I liked this better than Crimson Gold, and as far as movies with extended blowjob scenes, I suppose I liked this better than The Brown Bunny. But that’s not to say I liked this all that much. Certainly not in my top films of the decade there, Sight & Sound, but I suppose important critics give bonus points to stuff that can “willfully sabotage narrative tension and dynamism,” while I enjoy movies with more, I don’t know, narrative tension and dynamism?

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Opens with some very nice string music as the camera slowly reveals a girl giving a blowjob, and it looks like video but I can’t tell if that’s just the DVD transfer. Marcos the giant chauffeur picks up Ana the general’s daughter and escorts her to the “boutique” where she is secretly a high-class prostitute. They have awkward sex (her on top him being perfectly still, she jokingly says “calm down Marcos”) while the camera wanders off out the window, slowly takes in the whole courtyard area around the building before returning to the couple. I suppose that sabotaged narrative tension, and it was actually one of my favorite moments so maybe I like that sort of thing.

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Half an hour into the movie, Marcos quietly tells her “the thing is, my wife and I kidnapped a baby, and he died this morning.” Later at home his wife curses him out, saying the girl will talk to the police. So Marcos watches some soccer, takes a family trip (with the family whose baby he kidnapped – talk about awkward), then visits Ana and kills her with a big knife. If he hadn’t planned how to kill her without being caught, and he spoke of turning himself into the police anyway, I can’t see why killing Ana is a good idea except maybe to relieve some sort of sexual tension. Sight & Sound doesn’t know either, admitting the film is “riddled with enigmas.”

An uncharacteristic shot:
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Music at weird times – sweeping strings at the gas station, drum and horns after the sex scene. Sounds start to disappear. We see huge bells being rung in the rain, and we hear the rain but not the bells. There’s some religious business at the end, as Marcos wears a hood and shuffles into a church on his knees, to presumably die from blood loss at some time before the police enter the building.

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Director in interview: “Some people even think that I’m obsessed with awkward sex or fat people.” Says he wants to create the film more through the editing than camerawork… I assume from what little I’ve heard about them that Japon and Silent Light are vice-versa.

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Slant:

With his 2005 flamethrower Battle in Heaven he connects our discomfort viewing graphic sex to a daring critique of a country’s complicity in a man’s frustrated social situation. Reygadas provokes—calmly, not thuggishly—our contempt for his film’s radical aesthetic patterns and explicit sexual nature, suggesting our anxiety with the text’s essential unconventionality is tantamount to racism, bodyism, and anti-artism.

by ·Comments Off on Y tu mamá también (2001, Alfonso Cuarón)

Katy was surprised that Diego Luna used to be cuter than Gael Garcia Bernal.

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Maribel Verdú (currently costarring in Tetro, also the rebel servant who befriends our girl in Pan’s Labyrinth) is the cousin who gets a ride to the beach with a rich kid and his not-rich friend while their girlfriends are away, has sex with them both, stays at the beach while they go home then dies of cancer a month later. Oh also the kids make out with each other while drunk, destroying their friendship.

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Great cinematography by one of my favorites, Emmanuel Lubezki (The New World, Children of Men, Like Water for Chocolate). Oddly negative omniscient narrator fills us in on the gloomy details surrounding the characters. Really a lovely movie, despite my crappy summary.

by ·Comments Off on The Desert Within (2008, Rodrigo Plá)

Did anyone know it was illegal to be catholic in Mexico in the 1920’s and/or 30’s? That there was some kind of war going on? Thanks to my schooling history of dry, unengaging, U.S.-based history classes, I am barely aware that there is a country called Mexico, so my ignorance of its religious-political history can’t be surprising.

Elías lives with his mom and very pregnant wife, has seven kids and a leaky roof. Wife falls down fixing the roof, thinks her baby is dying, so asks Elías to fetch the preacher. Problem: the government has declared Catholicism illegal so getting a priest is risky. Now either the priest is leaving town, or he’s getting a group together to fight the gov’t, but Elías interferes and everyone (incl one of his sons) is killed. E. himself escapes but now everyone is mad at him so he grabs his newborn son, his newlydead wife and his remaining six kids and heads out to live all reclusive in the desert, building a church to atone for the killing of all those people.

Years pass! Youngest kid grows up sickly then gets better. A boy dies raising the church bell, two boys die of plague, and a girl goes mad and drowns herself looking for signs from god. Another boy visits his grandmother, who thinks he is Elías so he ends up living quietly with her and starting a family. The church is finished but Elías isn’t sure that he has been forgiven, frets about it and starts wrecking the church wall to rebuild it until he gets it right. Meanwhile, the two remaining kids, boy Aureliano and girl Micaela, start having sex with each other. She dies, father kills himself, Aureliano lives to narrate this movie in framing story.

Movie comes off as your standard prestige-pic, professionally made but without anything interesting to recommend it. It’s bummer city for the first half hour, then seems to go on forever and I’m thinking things will get better with the whole church-building, but tragedy and madness slowly follow until the movie dumps us off right back in bummer city where we started. I mean I guess Aureliano is free now, but the death of his sexy sister puts a damper on that, and the thing with the brother taking his father’s place at gramma’s could be fascinating if it was given more than a minute of screen time. Surprised to hear that this swept the Mexican academy awards, leaving the AFF’s big-deal closing-night pic Rudo y Cursi empty-handed.

by ·Comments Off on The Holy Mountain (1973, Alejandro Jodorowsky)

Even in a year of crazy films like The Wicker Man and Touki Bouki, ain’t nothing crazy enough to sit with The Holy Mountain. This was the last of Jodorowsky’s fully-realized features until Santa Sangre (nobody, AJ included, seems to like The Rainbow Thief or Tusk).

Third shot of movie: Director/Alchemist with women who will soon be shaved:
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First half-hour is free-flowing. A Thief (who I didn’t realize never speaks) wanders with a deformed dwarf, getting beaten up and attending a toad-and-chameleon circus, while around them dissidents are executed, riot police hold a dead-animal parade, and priests pick up underage prostitutes. Finally the thief breaks into a mighty tower occupied by The Alchemist (Jodorowsky himself) who cleanses him, turns his shit into gold, and then introduces our other characters and their corresponding planets:
– Fon/Venus – narcissist who runs fashion & cosmetic companies, slave to his dad
– Isla/Mars – major arms manufacturer
– Klen/Jupiter – sex-obsessed artist
– Sel/Saturn – makes war toys to prejudice kids vs. countries we plan to invade
– Berg/Uranus – murderous bureaucrat
– Axon/Neptune – ruthless mohawked police chief with testicle collection
– Lut/Pluto – futuristic architect, designing sleep-chamber apartments
(I had to look some of those up – movie is sensory overload, I forgot stuff)

Three chameleons prepare to defend Mexico from the toad invasion:
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Kind of a Jesus/disciples thing, but is the Thief Jesus or is the Alchemist? They go through intensive spiritual training, then Alchemist leads them to the Holy Mountain atop which nine ancient immortals control our planet, with the goal of deposing them and becoming immortal themselves. Each traveler has a dream of their own bizarre death, but they continue to the table at the summit, where they find dolls in the seats. Sitting down, camera pulls back to reveal Jodorowsky’s lighting and sound crew, and he proclaims the truth: “We are images, dreams, photographs,” freeing them from the film itself.

Atop The Holy Mountain:
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Haven’t checked out the commentary yet (tried to listen at work, but of course it’s in Spanish), but in a modern interview online, Jodorowsky says he never killed animals for his movies – not even the rabbits in El Topo. That’s surprising, but I’ll take the guy at his word. He also says he became a feminist during the making of Holy Mountain, and indeed it’s hard to think of movies less feminist than his previous two. He’s a fan of Lynch, Cronenberg and Starship Troopers, and I wish him luck with his long-delayed Lynch-produced next movie.

Alchemist & Thief in chamber of mirrors:
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Cinematographer Rafael Corkidi shot The Mansion of Madness the same year. A few of the actors have popped up elsewhere… Lut/Pluto had a small part in The Exterminating Angel, Axon/Neptune was an Oliver Stone collaborator throughout the 90’s, and Fon/Venus plays the lead girl’s dad on the show Rebelde.

Our director:
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After Calvaire and Frontier(s), it’s the third movie this week with a hair-shaving scene.