by ·Comments Off on Kanto Wanderer (1963, Seijun Suzuki)

Unique structure, starting with the girls in a crime town gazing at the local criminals, then spiraling into the lives of the criminals themselves. Who here is a Kanto wanderer, though?

Gutsy chick Hanako (Fukasaku regular Sanae Nakahara) gets sold into prostitution, sidelining the young women, while scarfaced Kat (Akira Kobayashi, between Rusty Knife and the Yakuza Papers) tries in vain to protect his boss while the rival gang’s warrior Diamond is on a bloody rampage. Kat is also hot for Diamond’s gambler-hustler sister (Hiroko Ito of Tattooed Life), flashing back to when he got his scar over her years earlier.

It’s a pretty okay story, but sometimes leads to great moments like this:

by ·Comments Off on Outrage Coda (2017, Takeshi Kitano)

I’m starting to wonder if these movies do have continuity and they’re not just starting over every time with the same cast playing new characters. I checked my writeups for parts one and two, and still don’t know for sure – but hey, one of those cops is back in this one.

The bulk of the movie is the higher-ups of a Japanese crime family plotting against each other: Ren Osugi, Sansei Shiomi, Toshiyuki Nishida. This goes on forever, and right when you can’t take any more of it, Kitano flies in with his buddy Ichi and they shoot a hundred guys. A few women appear, all of them prostitutes. I’m making this sound bad, but of course it’s a good time, and I’m looking forward to the brand new Kitano joint.

by ·Comments Off on Shadow of Fire (2023, Shinya Tsukamoto)

Restaurateur turned post-WWII desperate prostitute Shuri calls a kid “stray dog” right after I’d been thinking of the movie Stray Dogs because of the condition of her apartment walls. She takes in wannabe-customer Hiroki Kono and our lead kid – three fuckups acting like a makeshift family – though I didn’t realize the kid was the lead until the adults blew up at each other and the kid left to survive elsewhere.

Next he falls in with Mirai Moriyama, inheritor of Shin Kamen Rider‘s legacy. Mirai is excited that the kid has a pistol and enlists him in a sketchy revenge plot against his ex-superior officer. As with Kitano I’m catching Tsukamoto’s latest after missing his last two – one of which was also a late-WWII desperation drama. Unlike Kitano, it seems he’s settled down into prestige-drama mode, with only subtle hints of the handheld hopped-up maniac who made his early films.

by ·Comments Off on Poor Things (2023, Yorgos Lanthimos)

It’s not shocking that I, a habitual enjoyer of Yorgos movies, greatly enjoyed the one where Emma Stone plays a grown woman with a baby brain raised by a chopped-and-sutured Willem Dafoe then taken into the world by a ham-comic Mark Ruffalo. Doesn’t quite track as an On The Count of Three reunion – Jerrod Carmichael is an intellectual friend of Hanna Schygulla – in different scenes/country from Chris Abbott: Emma’s former husband, “The General,” who they lobotomize so everyone can live together happily.

The critics are mostly angry over the fisheye lens. Also: “the movie’s provocations are all at the level of its ghastly aesthetic, which feels like a prank on the viewer” per Brendanowicz, it’s “infantilizing and visually one-note” per Josephine, and I dunno what Ali and Jon‘s issues are. Movie funny, movie good. Some people get it.

by ·Comments Off on Nobody’s Hero (2022, Alain Guiraudie)

“There are radicalized Muslims in my living room.” Jean-Charles Clichet is a dumpy jogger who convinces a prostitute to sleep with him for free, and also delicately balances helping out a homeless kid with trying to get him arrested. Clichet’s secret power: he’s a Linux Guy. Not as warmhearted as Le Havre, but it’s another French movie about community circling around an immigrant visitor, feeling somewhat like a state-of-the-nation film – with wonderful and bizarre moments, as would be expected from the follow-up to Staying Vertical.

by ·Comments Off on Stroszek (1977, Werner Herzog)

It’s strange to see space alien Bruno S. playing someone besides Kaspar Hauser. Here he’s playing a version of himself, as are many of the actors, who autobiographically collaborated with Herzog on his hastily-written Germany-to-USA adventure. Reformed criminal/music lover Bruno helps Eva Mattes (Petra von Kant‘s daughter) while she’s on the run from her thug pimps (one of whom would later play Vigo in Ghostbusters II). The thugs barge in, assault Bruno and break his accordion. The neighbor who looks after Bruno (Kaspar Hauser fan-favorite Clemens) is leaving for Wisconsin, so Bruno and Eva join him.

Bad luck right off the bat as customs confiscates Bruno’s mynah bird (using its real voice, which is a big deal for birds in cinema). Werner discovers Weird Wisconsin immediately, filming two neighboring farmers on tractors with rifles. Bruno’s house is taken away for non-payment… not making enough cash as a waitress, Eva returns to prostitution and runs off with some truckers… and Clemens is arrested for robbery (the bank was closed so he robs the barber next door). Everything around him going to hell, poor Bruno wanders a live-bird amusement park then kills himself on a ski lift.

The credits thank Errol Morris, Les Blank and the documentarian who discovered Bruno in West Berlin. Supposedly Ian Curtis killed himself right after watching this movie, and yeah it’s a downer, but one night earlier I’d coincidentally watched New Order’s live set from Coachella 2013, and after seeing what a crank Bernard Sumner can be, I wouldn’t be so quick to blame the film.

by ·Comments Off on Zola (2020, Janicza Bravo)

Waitress/stripper Taylour “Zola” Paige joins new friend Riley Keough for a work/vaca trip to Tampa, not realizing the dude along for the ride is Riley’s pimp (Colman Domingo, Paige’s Ma Rainey costar). Instead of either participating or getting the hell out of there, Zola gets cut into the management side, negotiating Riley higher pay for her work. This all culminates in a fatal hostage situation caused in part by Riley’s suicidally dumb bf Nicholas Braun (of the Poltergeist remake), and our heroes survive mostly intact. I assume this is basically Spring Breakers, but with better music and based on a true story.

by ·Comments Off on A Room in Town (1982, Jacques Demy)

Starts and ends with a labor strike, but I guess 1982 was too little/late for Demy to be considered political enough to hang with the New Wave gang again. This is a tragedy version of The Young Girls of Rochefort: all-singing, love and coincidence following multiple characters through 1955 Nantes, ending in suicide and disaster.

Our doomed lovers are Edith (Dominique Sanda, also suicidal in Bresson’s Une femme douce) and Francois (Richard Berry, now a writer/director). She’s dabbling in prostitution to get away from her loveless marriage, walking the streets in only a fur coat.

Edith’s mom (Danielle Darrieux, the mom in Rochefort) is Francois’s landlady, though they won’t discover this until late. Edith’s impotent husband is a redbearded Michel Piccoli. In 1967 Danielle Darrieux’s character was dating Piccoli, and now 15 years later he’s married to her daughter. Danielle is ex-aristocracy, politically opposed to her “anarchist” tenant, dealing with loneliness after the recent death of her husband and a seldom-visiting petulant daughter who claims to be in eternal love with the man she met the night before.

Francois is a junior dockworker, so is afraid of losing his job during the strike. His sweet, lovely girlfriend Violette (Fabienne Guyon, a singer and stage actress) is pregnant, has a sweet, lovely mother (Anna Gaylor), but Francois tells Violette about his love affair and breaks everyone’s hearts. He joins his balding coworker (Jean-Francois Stevenin who plays the balding dude in everything: Le Pont du Nord, Small Change, The Limits of Control) on the front lines, and the movie ends how it must: Piccoli slashes his own throat, Francois gets his head smashed by the cops and Edith shoots herself.

Francois and Stevenin, with union leader Jean-Louis Rolland in the hat:

This was the last film from the box set, so I checked out the exhaustive A to Z extra by James Quandt. “Given his happy childhood, one wonders what accounts for all the broken families in his films.” Demy considered Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne “the formative influence of his career” and Quandt displays similarities between Bay of Angels and Pickpocket. “The director once said that his ideal would be to make fifty interlocking films elaborating on his characters’ overlapping destinies.” I knew about the Cocteau and Ophuls connections, but the segment on influences from paintings was fresh. Interesting sidenote on the axe murderer in Rochefort, and Une Chambre en Ville was said to be Demy’s dream project and he was crushed when it flopped.

by ·Comments Off on Tangerine (2015, Sean Baker)

Sin-Dee is back on the L.A. streets after a month in jail, finds out some new girl has been fucking her man/pimp James Ransone (Ziggy from The Wire s2) and goes on a rampage looking for either of them, enlisting her friend Alexandra for help.

The color and lighting in this movie is unusual – I guess it was shot on consumer equipment and tweaked in post. But the motion is different too, and I couldn’t figure out why until I looked through the screenshots I grabbed while watching… there’s almost no motion blur. Even when people are walking rapidly, which they usually are, every shot is crisp. So it’s an arresting-looking movie that starts out very annoying (every other word is “bitch”) then gets increasingly engaging and wonderful until it finally ends anticlimactically, with one of the lead characters (an Armenian cab driver named Ramzik) shamed in front of his family. Sure, he shouldn’t have been sneaking off from family holidays to have sex with transsexual prostitutes, but given that the movie’s other main characters are all transsexual prostitutes, that’s not the moral lesson I was expecting.

Family crisis at the Donut Time:

Baker made four previous features and a TV series, and has a new one out this year getting great reviews.