by ·Comments Off on Pirates (1986, Roman Polanski)

Sex criminals are suddenly in the news, so let’s see what Polanski made before Frantic. A decade after Fearless Vampire Killers, this director with a great talent for composition and psychological drama insists on going in a direction where he has no talent at all: the action comedy. He’s aiming for Goonies meets Airplane and ending up with flabby, lifeless spectacle.

Walter Matthau (doing an accent) and his sidekick Cris Campion (Day of Reckoning) are shipwrecked pirates, rescued by the Spanish, and the first half of the movie is them figuring out how to turn the tables on their rescuers/captors (led by The Doctor of Kill List) and conquer the ship. When they succeed a fellow mutineer tries to rape the lovely Charlotte Lewis (The Golden Child) but he is killed by Cris, because sex crime is not okay! Ends right where it started, with pirate and sidekick stranded on a lifeboat (this was nine months after After Hours came out).

Krank is as shocked to be here as you must be to see him:

by ·Comments Off on Project A (1983, Jackie Chan)

There’s a lotta plot here, but Jackie ends up working for his bar-brawl rival Yuen Biao (Rat/Weasel of Eastern Condors) and teaming up with gangster-gambler Sammo to fight corruption and then take on pirates. After a dumbass white admiral gets captured by dread pirate Lo (Dick Wei of Visa to Hell), Chan’s ex-coast-guarders go rogue, beat the shit out of a pirate collaborator to figure out how to contact them, and smuggle Sammo aboard in a barrel. When Chan goes through some gears then hangs from a clock tower, it’s hard to miss the classic silent comedy references, and since this is the week for great bicycle scenes, we get a chase where he beats up guys with a bike in ten different ways.

Jackie was just in Locarno:

I think back to when we made those films, and we had so many problems [on the set]. It would be raining terribly. Something serious not working. On Project A, we got seasick, the [scenes of the] pirates on the sea were so difficult to do… but we kept going, and no matter what, we finished the movie. Then when it came out it was a success, and 40 years later people are still watching it. That’s what I signed up for. You see so many movies, so many directors – and nobody remembers them today. But then a few movies, 100 years later, are still there. At some point, I said to myself: I want to make this kind of movie, no matter how difficult it will be. When I pass away, I want the next generations to say there’s Bruce Lee, there’s Chaplin, there’s Jackie Chan.

by ·Comments Off on À Flor do Mar (1986, João César Monteiro)

“Life is made of mistakes.” A family has a big few days harboring a fugitive. I think people are calling it Ruizian because of the pirates, but it’s truly very euro-arthouse, and I dig it. Rivettian in a few ways: long takes, long movie, creaky furniture and a cat following its own direction. I knew nothing about Monteiro a couple months ago, and now I’ve seen Silvestre and all his movies have been newly-restored on blu-ray, and why not watch them all?

Laura (the prolific Laura Morante of The Son’s Room and Coeurs) had moved her kids to Italy after her husband died suddenly last summer, is back on the Portuguese coast to visit her sisters-in-law (older Oliveira regular Manuela de Freitas, younger Teresa Villaverde, better known as a director) when an American washes up on the beach, so she takes him home to hide out. He successfully lays low during searches from police and pirates, then leaves them alone. “We’ll have to learn how to use up the remaining unhappiness.”

I don’t know whether the guy was named after Conan the Barbarian writer Robert Jordan on purpose, or if Laura’s last name being Rossellini is meaningful, but Sara recites from Doomed Love (she appeared in the film eight years earlier), and their cat is named Silvestre.

The lead actors staring at Monteiro:

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China V (1994, Tsui Hark)

The stupidest, goofiest entry, thanks to the full line of disciples and family members from parts one through four being together for the first time – and also the most shootiest and explosionest. This time they’re fighting sea pirates, led by Elder Paco (a Yes Madam spinoff), Junior Stephen (Hard Boiled), and Elaine (The Bride with White Hair), and fortunately Katy didn’t watch this one (the pirates have an entire crate full of the severed fingers of their victims). It’s not as exciting as it sounds.

The gang:

by ·Comments Off on Madame X (1978, Ottinger & Blumenschein)

I guess after luring women onto her pirate ship, X kills them one by one with her artificial hand-knife.

Notes I sent to TB:
– Call chinese orlando, stop.
– “Ottinger” must mean “one-take” in German
– I feel like Bertrand Mandico has watched this movie more than once.
– This fits in nicely with the avant-garde traditions, in that some things (color, music, costumes, visual concept, counterculture vibes) are really good, and others (pacing, sound sync, pacing, mst3k-ass acting, pacing) are unbearable.
– But is the pacing unbearable because we are brainwashed by commercial cinema… would I rather be watching Mission: Impossible 5 because that’s the style of movie the capitalist system taught me to enjoy… I dunno, it’s worth questioning, but when I break free from hollywood pacing I like to break really decisively free (ahem Stray Dogs), while this feels more like a really slow John Waters movie. Fails to cast a spell, and if you only pay half attention it dissipates entirely.
– Feminism, tho. I guess.
– And a macaw if you make it to the end

by ·Comments Off on Porco Rosso (1992, Hayao Miyazaki)

Porco is a daredevil pilot with a broken-down plane, chasing pirates, who at least have a code of honor. The pirates team up with hotshot pilot Curtis, who falls for Porco’s girl Gina. Porco is stuck with young architect Fio until his climactic dogfight, which becomes a boxing match when both planes are incapacitated, then everyone gets back up and flees the fascist government. It’s a fun pig adventure that holds onto a nice sense of mystery at the end.

by ·Comments Off on Love Torn in Dream (2000, Raoul Ruiz)

We have found another great Ruiz movie – the cinematography and music in this are not kidding around. Like La Flor, it opens with a diagram of the movie’s structure, then proceeds to blend some of Ruiz’s favorite things (pirates, painting, mirrors) into a meta-narrative folding in on itself. Death is extremely temporary here. Throw in some cannibalism and incest. And of course there’s a Ruiz film with morphing in it, why wouldn’t there be?

Guy Scarpetta in Rouge:

Here, the familiar features of Ruiz’s universe – parallel worlds, baroque uncertainties, telescoping of different times, co-presence of multiple spaces, deconstruction of characters, transgression of every parameter of classical narrative – are subject to an overflowing enthusiasm and gamesmanship … But we must not conclude that the film proceeds from the pure arbitrariness of an unbridled imagination. Quite the contrary, and this is the first great paradox to be emphasised: nothing, here, is left to chance … Nine narrative themes (in principle autonomous, heterogeneous) are posed as the raw material … the entire combinatory consists of making these cellular narratives cross each other’s paths, whether two by two or three by three, and also consecutively – each of these telescopings engendering, almost automatically, a specific narrative (one which logically implies that the characters can double or reincarnate themselves, leap time frames, and belong in several places at once).

by ·Comments Off on Invention for Destruction (1958, Karel Zeman)

Jiri Menzel had just died, but instead of one of his movies on a Monday night I chose his countryman. I’ve seen some career-bookend works by Zeman, his early Prokouk shorts and late feature The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but not the heyday works, and this was spectacular. Real people against illustrated backgrounds, the Sin City of its time. Every kind of animation and visual trick seamlessly integrated, the thin striped pattern from the book illustrations appearing everywhere, overall amazing visual design… and to think his Baron Munchausen is supposed to be even better and I’ve been meaning to rent it for twenty years.

Our Narrator is assisting a scientist when the two are kidnapped (along with a pretty lady, of course) by pirates and taken to an evil mastermind inside a volcano who gets the scientist to help him unlock the secrets of the atom and conquer the world. The narrator is alarmed by all this but the scientist is happily distracted with a new lab and new problems to solve, until the very end, when he realizes what he’s doing and nukes the volcano. In the meantime we get submarines, a fighting octopus, parrots and fishes, of course a balloon or two, and a fantasy tour through all the inventions of the era, real and imagined (camels on rollerskates!), an alternate vision of what Tesla could’ve been.

by ·Comments Off on The Pirate (1948, Vincente Minnelli)

Criterion posted a pile of MGM musicals, and I got Katy to watch The Pirate, which she didn’t like, even though it’s about a circus-boss scam-artist ladies’ man who pretends to be a notorious pirate in order to win over a pretty girl, then discovers her fiancee is the real notorious pirate, fat and retired.

Stars: Gene and Judy

Blustery and Loud: Walter Sleestack (The Clock King of TV’s Batman) and Gladdie Cooper (Mrs. Higgins in My Fair Lady)

Yitz: Lester Allen as Capucho, the movie’s secret star

Michael Koresky:

In The Pirate, Garland’s unhappily betrothed Manuela, who craves romance and adventure, insists, “Underneath this prim exterior, there are depths of emotion, romantic longings.” It’s a statement that could be made by virtually any character in any musical. These are hardly frivolous matters. The musical is for anyone who has ever longed for something or someone — that is to say, everyone. What is life without fantasy? To be firmly grounded, one must occasionally walk on air.