by ·Comments Off on Yumeji (1991, Seijun Suzuki)

Our guy is a notorious artist of sexy paintings (pop star Kenji Sawada has made good movie choices, playing leads in Hiruko the Goblin, Mishima, and Happiness of the Katakuris). His pretty young beloved is sick at home with her parents, wants to elope but not right now, so Yumeji enjoys a heavy romp with a prostitute, picks up another artist’s model, and becomes obsessed with a widow(?) and her bizarre story, until her husband (the crazy guy from Zigeunerweisen, even crazier) arrives and chases everyone around.

The Women of Yumeji: Covering her mouth tuberculosively is Hikono, who starred in Strange Circus. Center standing is model Oyo from a hitman movie called Pornostar and center seated/smiling is Mrs. Wakiya, who later starred in similar sounding Two Portraits of Miyagino (artist/prostitute love triangle, disappearance, kabuki-style sets). These two seem to have swapped personalities for this portrait, but I haven’t misidentified them unless they also swapped kimonos. I’ll dishonorably join the rest of the web in not being able to identify the others, but far left is the prostitute he’s with at the beginning.

I’m (re)watching these out of order, Yumeji coming a decade after Zigeunerweisen and Kagero-za – the cinema world loves a trilogy. Extremely loosely based on true events, the movie also plays fast and loose with dream/reality, life/death. Despite the apparent genre of “period artist biography,” it’s unpredictable and bizarre, with something crazy in nearly every shot.

Sean Rogers in Cinema Scope:

While Kagero-za ends with an unexpected and unnerving glimpse into some kind of afterlife, Yumeji begins a little more reassuringly, with events that soon get explicitly figured as a dream — even if the protagonist dreams of a duel in which he gets shot in the head. After all, the yume from Yumeji also means “dream,” as the renowned real-life painter Yumeji Takehisa muses toward the end of the film, which fictionalizes a period in his life from around 1918 … As in Zigeunerweisen and Kagero-za, the film closes with the prospect of Yumeji’s transportation across a body of water to a dimension of death or dream, this time ferried there by “the devil” Onimatsu.

by ·Comments Off on Festival (1967, Murray Lerner)

Another concert compilation film, this one taken from multiple years of folk fests.

PP&M sing their hit song about having a hammer and a couple Dylan tunes, but more importantly Mary appears to have two moles on her neck in a vampire bite pattern. Seeger sings about creamed corn, some bluegrass guys tear it up, some blues guys chill it out. Joan Baez gets the best lines during an autograph session and an after-show interview, including telling fans “don’t get so hysterical,” which hits hard in this beatlemanic era. She’s down to earth in a film otherwise full of statements like “you don’t choose to play music, music chooses to play you.”

Blue Ridge Mountain Dancers:

Movie stops dead while a couple of guys attempt to explain the blues, less successfully than the Edward Bland movie explained jazz. I appreciate the continuation of a TNT Show theme by showing the white audience clap out-of-time with Howlin’ Wolf. Lerner had a perfect career, making nothing but rock docs. One of the DPs later shot more than one Dick Sargent thriller.

by ·Comments Off on The Cannibals (1988, Manoel de Oliveira)

Leonor falls in love with goth Luis Miguel, then is surprised when he acts all goth on their wedding night. The mismatched couple acts all doomed and stoic, allowing her stalker Diogo Doria and the narrator Oliveira Lopes to be pop-eyed loons in the opera’s background.

I had decided that the title must be a metaphor, but for what? Then at the end of the second act, all the lead characters kill themselves, and a new group of men is introduced, who eat Luis Miguel, thinking him part of the bridal party feast after he’d hurled his own limbless torso into the fireplace.

Watching Oliveira films mainly makes one wish to watch more Oliveira films. Looks like good options at the moment are: the earliest stuff through 1964, the latest stuff post-Belle Toujours, and Party – everything else apparently has new restorations that aren’t out on video yet.

by ·Comments Off on The Big Clock (1948, John Farrow)

Ray Milland is a bad husband to Maureen O’Sullivan, working for toxic boss Charles Laughton. When the boss threatens to fire and blacklist Ray from the publishing industry if he leaves for a long-delayed honeymoon, Ray responds by standing up his wife and getting drunk with some strange girl (Rita Johnson, Ray’s fiancee in The Major and the Minor). Coincidentally the strange girl is the boss’s mistress, whom the boss murders that same night, calling in his cleaner Steve (Human Duplicator George Macready) and his top crime investigator Ray (still 15 years away from acquiring his X-RAY EYES).

Ray runs around finding clues that all point to himself, while everyone he met that night is being generous to him and his wife, understandably, is not. Bringing together the two greatest movies of the past decade, Laughton is terrific as the wicked publisher, and he’s inordinately proud of his clockwork device. Fighting his way out from the big clock, Ray incapacitates the henchman, and to everyone’s horror, he stops the big clock. The boss runs off shooting in a frenzy and falls down an elevator shaft.

The Big Sleeves:

Remade once with Yves Montand, again with Kevin Costner. The producer later wrote a pile of James Bond movies, the DP had recently shot three great Preston Sturges films, and the director and lead actress had recently produced Mia.

by ·Comments Off on When We Were Kings (1996, Leon Gast)

The champ, George Foreman, vs. the kid, Muhammad Ali, in Zaire
And other politics involved in the affair
Including rare footage leading up to the event
Plus, interviews with VIPs, remembering the effects
…
We heard about that legendary clashing of the titans
But could never have contextualized the metrics or environment
Until, 90 minutes of history
And images and music, I was riveted, infinity

Listened/half-watched while assembling furniture after turning on Henry Fonda For President and realizing it had subtitles. Good movie.

by ·Comments Off on The Ladies Man (1961, Jerry Lewis)

Jerry gets a live-in job at a womens boarding house. It’s overwhelming but whenever he tries to sneak out, they tell him he’s important to them, so he stays. Movie has very little story, very few good jokes, but some of the best-ever set design.

The girls include Gloria Jean, two decades after hurting WC’s ears in Never Give a Sucker, Billy Wilder regular Hope Holiday, and Kathleen Freeman, the only actor in Fritz Lang’s House by the River to also appear in Shrek. Buddy Lester is quite good as a scarfaced antagonist, George Raft significantly less good as himself.

by ·Comments Off on Three by Roscoe Arbuckle

Oh Doctor (1917)

Arbuckle’s doctor is a horrible man, abusing his son Buster, straying from his wife at any opportunity, and gambling away the family savings on a hunch. Some people try to scam him but he beats them up, steals a bunch of cash, prospers. An evil movie!

–
The Cook (1918)

A whole different thing, Arbuckle & Keaton coordinating impossible stunts in a kitchen with a running gag that all food orders come out of the same giant pot. Sure it gets weird when The Joker arrives at the restaurant and tries to dance some ladies to death.

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The Bell Boy (1918)

More ingenious gags, plus some silly haircuts. Ended up watching this one twice.

The Joker (Roscoe’s nephew Al St. John) demonstrates how not to ride a horse:

by ·Comments Off on Paradise (2009, Michael Almereyda)

List of things that quicken the heart.

Almereyda in Metrograph:

The early 2000s happened to be a fallow time for me, and it was consoling to think big while gathering footage with a little camera. Magical things were always materializing, flashing by, almost as if the camera were inviting them to happen.