by ·Comments Off on Lesson of Evil (2012, Takashi Miike)

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve watched a Miike movie. I caught the Zebraman double-feature at the beginning of 2012, and he has made nine new ones since then. Here’s one of those, a high-school horror/slasher that’s fortunately better than One Missed Call. Acting, cinematography all quite good, but the top IMDB comment “brutal fun, but nothing more” seems accurate.

Mr. Hasumi (Hideaki Ito of The Princess Blade, Over Your Dead Body) is the hotshot new teacher, good looking, sensitive to his students’ problems. He gets involved in everyone’s business, seemingly as a benevolent authority-type. Student Keisuke leads a cellphone exam-cheating ring and teacher Radio Tsurii may be blocking cell signals to stop it. Mr. Kume is blowing his student Masahiko, and Mr. Shibahara is sexually blackmailing student Miya. Rina is being bullied at school, or perhaps her jittery dad is overreacting – we’re never sure. The dad dies in a fire after Hasumi gets involved, and Hasumi “rescues” Miya but then starts sleeping with her, using Mr. Kume’s apartment, which he’s blackmailing Kume to use, and maybe Hasumi’s not such a hero after all.

I didn’t think it seemed very much like a horror movie by this point, but then Hasumi kidnaps cheater Keisuke and tortures him to death with a soldering iron. Flashback to Hasumi’s time at Harvard, during which he and another grad student went on a small murder spree. Hasumi is more ambitious now, grabs a shotgun and massacres every kid at school during a halloween-party lock-in. He basically murders everyone in the entire movie, except a couple kids who fool him at the end, then as he’s feigning insanity while being locked up, we’re promised “TO BE CONTINUED” by the titles.

After suffering through a scratchy German record of “Mack the Knife” a few times, we’re finally rewarded with an American rock version during the massacre. Oh also Hasumi’s shotgun sometimes turns into a fleshy Naked Lunchy eyeball thing that speaks in the Harvard guy’s voice.

Radio Tsurii was Mitsuru Fukikoshi (star of Sion Sono’s Cold Fish), soldering victim Keisuke was Shota Sometani (star of Sion Sono’s Himizu), pederast Shibahara was Takayuki Yamada (star of Sion Sono’s Shinjuku Swan) and one of the girls was Fumi Nikaido (star of Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play In Hell). Why am I suddenly getting the urge to check out some Sion Sono movies?

by ·Comments Off on SCOTtober double-feature: The Hunger and Alien

Checked out Tony Scott’s The Hunger for the first time in lovely HD, then watched his brother Ridley’s Alien on blu-ray the same night for a SCOTtober double-feature.

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The Hunger (1983)

Cool looking movie with Nic Roegian editing – and I noticed this before listening to Tony Scott’s commentary, where he admits to being Roeg-obsessed. Scott worked in commercials, and brings their slick-as-snails visuals to a noirish vampire flick, opening with a Bahuaus video intercut with agitated lab monkeys. If that sounds like something that might not fly with the public, it apparently didn’t.

The eternally-youthful Catherine Deneuve is a centuries-old vampire living with true love David Bowie. Bowie seems like perfect casting for a vampire movie, but something goes wrong and he starts rapidly growing older (it’s perverse to hide Bowie under age-makeup), trying at the last minute to get help from blood specialist Susan Sarandon, and eating a neighbor kid (soap star Beth Ehlers) in a panic.

Aged Bowie:

Master vampire Deneuve is used to this sort of thing, stashes Bowie in the attic with the other aged corpses of former lovers, and begins seducing Sarandon. But Dr. Susan is too self-aware for vampire life, kills herself, and the zombie lovers rise up to destroy Catherine.

No fangs – our vampires use ankh-shaped knives to bleed their victims. A bit too many slow-motion doves flying but mostly the style works in the movie’s favor. Not according to Ebert, who called it “agonizingly bad” but enjoyed the sex scene. Played out-of-competition at Cannes, where Bowie’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence was competing with L’Argent, The King of Comedy and Nostalghia.

Scott later directed two episodes of the 1990’s anthology horror series The Hunger, hosted by Bowie. Enjoyed seeing Dan Hedaya as a cop but I missed Willem Dafoe’s cameo. Sarandon’s lab coworker Rufus Collins had previous vampire-film experience in Warhol’s Batman Dracula, and her other coworker Cliff De Young starred in Pulse and Dr. Giggles. Writer Whitley Streiber explored werewolves in Wolfen and aliens in Communion.

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Alien (1979)

Has that Star Trek: The Motion Picture tendency to slowly bask in its models and space effects. The creature puppets weren’t as dodgy-looking as I remember them (though there’s such a bad edit right before Ian Holm’s disembodied head starts talking).

Spaceship control room looks like a sound booth with Christmas lights:

After watching this and Prometheus on blu-ray within a couple months of each other, I don’t get why people think there needs to be more connection between the two – one seems to be referencing the other pretty clearly to me.

There’s this thing:

And this guy:

And dudes who touch things they should not be touching:

And an android who does not appear to have everyone’s best interests at heart (his orders end with “crew expendable”).

You don’t think of Tom Skerritt as being the first-billed star of Alien, but I guess Weaver was an unknown at the time (or they didn’t want to telegraph who will survive from the opening credits). Veronica Cartwright had been in Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake the year before. Harry Dean Stanton doesn’t do much horror but Wise Blood and Fire Walk With Me might count. Yaphet Kotto starred in Larry Cohen’s Bone and lived through Freddy’s Dead. And John Hurt has appeared in Hellboy, Only Lovers Left Alive, and something called The Ghoul.

by ·Comments Off on Hour of the Wolf (1968, Ingmar Bergman)

Supposedly Bergman’s only horror film, but what, the rape/revenge film that inspired Last House on the Left and the most toxic family relations I’ve ever seen and tormented people leading meaningless lives and dead men coming to life and plagues, burning at the stake and death incarnate don’t count as horror anymore?

This one does have phantoms, shaky reality and dangerous insanity, and opens the way horror films do today, claiming to be based on some evidence (in this case a diary) left behind after a disappearance. Liv Ullmann (Autumn Sonata) speaks into camera, setting up the rest of the film as a flashback, her summer on an island with painter husband Max von Sydow.

Liv’s actually the first one to see a phantom, a sweet old woman (216 years old, played by Naima Wifstrand, Granny in The Magician) who says Liv should read Max’s diary while he’s away. So when others start appearing to Max, I’m not sure if they’re real or not. There’s Baron Erland Josephson (a skeptic in The Magician, a madman in Nostalghia) with an invitation to his castle, Max’s naked ex-girlfriend Veronica Vogler (Ingrid Thulin, also a Vogler in The Magician), and a psychiatrist who Max knocks down in anger. Later Max and Liv attend a dinner party with the Baron and the psychiatrist and others (including Gudrun Brost, the clown’s exhibitionist wife in Sawdust & Tinsel, and Gertrud Fridh, Sjöström’s wife in Wild Strawberries), and they seem real enough, but Max’s state of mind is in question – he sweats as the camera whip-pans from one babbling nut to another.

The opening title appears a second time, like an intermission in a 90-minute film. The second party at the castle is less sane. Max is repeatedly promised that he’ll get to see Veronica, while the other guests show off: the Baron walks on the walls, a woman removes her face, Max is given lipstick and eyeliner and taken to meet the still-naked, possibly-dead Veronica, whereupon he states: “The mirror has been shattered. But what do the pieces reflect?” Later Liv tells us he came home and shot at her, then disappeared into the woods.

I actually think Bergman’s movies are more frightening when he’s not trying to be so Halloweeny:

Bergman’s follow-up to Persona, and they seem to have a lot in common, with dialogue about people who live together becoming alike. The DVD extras are awfully repetitive, but Marc Gervais has a few useful things to say, that Bergman’s films of this time were about personality disintegration, also his darkest and most self-conscious period (sounds of film production run under the opening titles).

by ·Comments Off on Kotoko (2011, Shinya Tsukamoto)

This fits in nicely with Tsukamoto’s Haze and Nightmare Detective, which featured lead characters more convincingly distraught and psychologically unbalanced, more grimly depicted than you’re used to seeing in horror movies (always with crazed handheld camera). Now we’ve got a young mother (Cocco, who also wrote the story and songs and did art direction) living alone with her toddler. Just that simple character setup (young mother + child) is enough to make you cringe if you’ve seen any Tsukamoto movies.

Sure enough, she is extremely tormented, overprotecting the child at some times and plotting to murder him at others. Actually she does murder him onscreen, but since the movie reflects her baffled view on reality, he turns up alive a minute later. Fortunately (as rarely happens in horror movies) people notice that she’s clearly an unfit mother, take the son away and leave him with relatives, and Kotoko passes the time between her allowed visits sitting home, cutting her arms and watching them bleed.

But where’s Tsukamoto, who likes to star in his own films? He plays an award-winning novelist (his first book is entitled Bullet Dance) who begins stalking Kotoko after hearing her sing on a bus. He’s concerned for her safely, encourages her to cut him instead of herself. That relationship is going alright until he turns out to possibly not exist… and she’s excited that she’s getting her son back until that also turns out not to be true. Epilogue, she’s in the loony bin being visited by her now-teenage son and doing crazy crying dances in the rain.

The first few minutes are insane – Kotoko sees people as twins, has to quickly determine which of the two is the evil one trying to destroy her so she can fight back. “I don’t see double when I am singing.” The movie’s a bit long (have I mentioned that I love Haze‘s 50-minute length?), padded by Cocco’s songs.

by ·Comments Off on Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972, Robert Fuest)

Happy SHOCKtober!

In early September I assembled a list of SHOCKtober contenders. So many promising horror films! Since it looks like my Mets might be in the postseason threatening SHOCKtober screen time, and since I’m usually a month behind on the blog anyway, I went ahead and started watching them, beginning with this sorry sequel to one of my faves from last year.

Phibes with raptor:

Opens with a full recap of the first movie, in case you missed it. And even though Vincent Price is embalmed and buried at recap’s end, sure enough he’s waking up right afterwards. This one’s got an interesting concept at least, as Phibes has taken his revenge for the death of his wife, but she’s still dead, so now he’s going after a fabled fountain of life beneath some ancient Egyptian tomb. Better, Phibes has a rival – an archaeologist named Beiderbeck (Robert Quarry, star of Count Yorga, Vampire, with a silly voice but okay sideburns) who has survived for centuries with a small vial of eternal-life water and now seeks the source.

Phibes jacked-in:

That all sounds promising, and Phibes 1 was heaps of fun, but I wasn’t feeling it this time. Less well shot (DP Alex Thomson later worked with David Fincher and Nic Roeg), less well written (Fuest cowrote with Robert Blees: Frogs, High School Confidential), and less interestingly designed (lot of people talking in front of plain white walls). Slower-paced scenes and a vaguely shabby feeling. I do enjoy when Price “speaks” by plugging a guitar cable into the jack in his neck, but the characters who move their mouths might as well have done the same, with all the dialogue-editing blunders I caught. The hapless cops from the first movie are even more hapless here, Terry-Thomas reappears as a new character, and minor characters are dispatched regularly via scorpion, snake, raptor (unconvincingly), sandblasting, crushing, telephone, etc.

Mouseover to see how one gets killed by telephone:
image

IMDB trivia reveals arguments, power struggles, rivalries, changes “for budget reasons” and a final script composed of two separate scripts “sort of stuck together”. So the movie’s disappointing but I guess it’s surprising it turned out as well as it did. Nice ending: Phibes floats away with his wife’s coffin on the enchanted river singing “Over the Rainbow” as time catches up with Beiderbecke outside, suddenly aging him to death faster than Bowie in The Hunger.

Phibes with Vulnavia with sousaphone:

There’s a new Vulnavia (Valli Kemp) since women are interchangeable. First dead archaeologist who attracts police attention is Hugh Griffith (Polanski’s What? and Fuest’s The Final Programme), dead guy’s cousin is Beryl Reid (The Killing of Sister George) and Beiderbeck’s woman is Fiona Lewis (Liszt’s neglected wife in Lisztomania).

by ·Comments Off on Film Fest Faves (FESTIFEST)

I happened to watch my first Hong Sang-soo movie right before his new one premiered, won the Golden Leopard and was featured on Cinema Scope’s front page, which gave me more emotional investment in all this. Before recently he was just a name – a repeatedly championed name, but still. So I’ve made a list of other currently-working(?) filmmakers whose names come up in magazines and festival reports but I’ve never checked out – including a few lingering overlaps with the 50 Under 50 list (Rodrigues, Alonso, Pereda) and a few overlaps with a similar list I made five years ago (Suleiman, Iosseliani, Lee). The goal: to watch at least one film by each, so next time I see their name I’ll have some context.

Lisandro Alonso (La Libertad, Los Muertos, Liverpool, Jauja)
Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust & Bone, Dheepan)
Marco Bellocchio (Good Morning Night, Vincere, Blood of My Blood)
Rachid Bouchareb (Days of Glory, Outside the Law)
Jean-Claude Brisseau (Exterminating Angels, Girl From Nowhere, Secret Things)
Antonio Campos (Afterschool, Simon Killer)
J.C. Chandor (A Most Violent Year, All Is Lost, Margin Call)
Isabel Coixet (Elegy, Secret Life of Words, My Life Without Me)
Anton Corbijn (Control, The American)
Lav Diaz (Norte, From What Is Before, Century of Birthing)
Mati Diop (Atlantiques, Snow Canon, A Thousand Suns)
Jacques Doillon (Just Anybody, Ponette, Le petit criminel)
Xavier Dolan (Mommy, Tom at the Farm, Heartbeats, I Killed My Mother)
Bruno Dumont (Lil Quinquin, Hors Satan, Hadewijch, L’Humanite)
Pascale Ferran (Bird People, Lady Chatterley)
Bahman Ghobadi (Nobody Knows About Persian Cats, Turtles Can Fly, Half Moon)
Amos Gitai (Kadosh, Kippur, Free Zone)
Philippe Grandrieux (Un Lac, A New Life, Sombre)
James Gray (Two Lovers, The Immigrant, Lost City of Z)
Eugene Green (Portuguese Nun, La Sapienza, Le Pont des Arts, Toutes les nuits)
Jose Luis Guerin (Memories of a Morning, Guest, In the City of Sylvia)
Lucile Hadzihalilovic (Innocence, Evolution)
Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years)
Mia Hansen-Love (Father of My Children, Goodbye First Love, Things To Come)
Otar Iosseliani (Adieu plancher des vaches, Jardins en automne, Chantrapas, Winter Song)
Benoit Jacquot (School of Flesh, A Single Girl, A Tout de Suite, Diary of a Chambermaid)
Jiang Wen (Devils on the Doorstep, Let the Bullets Fly, The Sun Also Rises)
Miranda July (The Future, Me and You and Everyone We Know)
Naomi Kawase (The Mourning Forest, Shara)
Andrei Konchalovsky (The Postman’s White Nights, Inner Circle)
Nadav Lapid (Policeman, The Kindergarten Teacher)
Pablo Larrain (Tony Manero, Post Mortem, No, The Club)
Lee Chang-dong (Poetry, Secret Sunshine, Oasis, Peppermint Candy)
Sergei Loznitsa (Maidan, In the Fog, Austerlitz)
Jodie Mack (a bunch of shorts)
Lech Majewski (Onirica, The Mill and the Cross, Glass Lips)
Brillante Mendoza (Captive, Kinatay, Serbis)
Bennett Miller (Capote, Moneyball, Foxcatcher)
Lukas Moodysson (We Are The Best, Hole In My Heart, Lilya 4ever, Container)
Darezhan Omirbayev (Student, Kairat)
Ruben Ostlund (Force Majeure, Play, Involuntary)
Nicolas Pereda (Summer of Goliath, Greatest Hits, Minotaur)
Nicolas Philibert (To Be and To Have, Nenette, In the Land of the Deaf)
Joaquim Pinto (What Now? Remind Me, Fish Tail)
Rafi Pitts (The Hunter, It’s Winter)
Joao Pedro Rodrigues (Last Time I Saw Macao, To Die Like a Man)
Ira Sachs (Love is Strange, Keep the Lights On, Little Men)
Ben & Joshua Safdie (Heaven Knows What, Good Time)
So Young Kim (Treeless Mountain, In Between Days)
Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo, This Must Be The Place, The Great Beauty, Youth)
Elia Suleiman (The Time That Remains, Divine Intervention)
Bertrand Tavernier (Coup de torchon, Sunday in the Country, Life and Nothing But)
Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit (Mary is Happy, 36)
Tran Anh Hung (Norwegian Wood, Cyclo, Scent of Green Papaya)
Joachim Trier (Oslo August 31)
Denis Villeneuve (Polytechnique, Incendies, Prisoners, Sicario)
Peter Von Bagh (Socialism, Helsinki Forever) edit: R.I.P.

Oh man, this list is longer than I thought it’d be.
I may have no choice but to tackle ’em film-fest style.
A festival of filmmakers who show up regularly at festivals… a FESTIFEST.

EDIT Dec. 2015: I still like the FESTIFEST idea, and am keeping the name, but when this season’s Sundance slate was announced I changed focus from the above list. Now when a new film is announced by a director I’ve heard about but never seen, I’m prioritizing watching one of his/her previous films. For example, Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine was announced, and I haven’t seen anything by Greene as director, so I watched his Actress from last year. Don’t think I’ll add those to the bottom of this list as the year goes on, because I have enough trouble keeping track of things.

by ·Comments Off on Autumn Tale (1998, Eric Rohmer)

Last of the Four Seasons, and the only one I had to watch at home (in HD, at least) since I missed the theatrical screening. Still a total pleasure. Maybe the happiest of the four, with no heartbreaking decisions to make, just a will-they-or-won’t-they with a couple that’s obviously good for each other.

Magali:

Actually there’s a bit of craziness in the middle, when Isabelle reveals to the man she’s dating that she’s actually married. Isabelle (Marie Rivière, star of The Green Ray and The Aviator’s Wife) has posted a personals ad and attracted Gerald (Alain Libolt of Lady and the Duke, also thief Renaud of Out 1), then after screening him on a few outings, she admits she was acting on a friend’s behalf – prickly vineyard owner Magali (Béatrice Romand of A Good Marriage and Claire’s Knee) who is lonely but refuses to go looking for love.

Gerald & Isabelle:

Magali finally meets Gerald at Isabelle’s daughter Emilia’s wedding, where, not knowing of Isabelle’s plot, Rosine (Magali’s son’s girlfriend) also tries to hook her professor ex-boyfriend up with Magali. That fails immediately – after all the build-up, the two spend about thirty seconds together then the professor wanders off to talk with younger women. Magali misunderstands the Gerald situation and runs off angrily, then she and Gerald return to the wedding looking for each other, and all is well.

Rosine introduces Magali to the professor:

Interesting that all three leads are Rohmer regulars, since the other movies were mostly cast with unknowns. Maybe the Béatrice Romand-starring A Good Marriage should be my next Rohmer, since she was such fun to watch in this movie. This played at Venice alongside Run Lola Run, New Rose Hotel and Black Cat White Cat, winning best screenplay.

by ·Comments Off on Cover Girl (1944, Charles Vidor)

A breakout role for Gene Kelly, who was starting to come into his own after the draft-dodging nonsense in For Me and My Gal. He runs a nightclub, is best friends with dancer Rusty (Rita Hayworth, before Gilda and Lady From Shanghai) and comedian Genius (Phil Silvers, TV’s Sgt. Bilko). Obviously Gene and Rita like each other, but Gene has to make the first move because it’s the 1940’s and he’s not good with feelings, so when she becomes a popular magazine cover girl, he lets her run off to a larger theater instead of asking her to stay.

Eve Arden, the best part of One Touch of Venus (she’s the poyle in the erster), plays the same sardonic type here, cutting through the music-fantasy atmosphere whenever she’s onscreen. She works with businessman Otto Kruger (High Noon, Power of the Press), who has movie-padding flashbacks to when he almost married Rita’s grandmother. Now Rita is being pushed to marry her new theater manager Lee Bowman (I Met Him In Paris, House by the River), and there’s kind of an interesting ending, as Kruger gets her to leave him for Gene, leaving Lee to a life of romantic regret identical to Kruger’s.

Not very memorable songs (the weird “Poor John” sung by flashback-Rita is all that comes to mind) but a decent movie. Nice man-vs-reflection street dance number for Gene. Weird trick-photography montage at the end with all the popular magazines’ latest cover girls (IMDB says one had already been in numerous movies, one was Harold Lloyd’s daughter, and another would marry Jean Negulesco). Leslie Brooks, also with Rita in You Were Never Lovelier, is good as her dancer-frenemy. And Genius, well, he’s grating and horrible as a comedian, but as a buddy of Gene and Rita, I eventually came around to him.

Sequel Xanadu came out almost 40 years later.

by ·Comments Off on Television watched mid-2015

“TV is a nickname, nicknames are for friends, and television is no friend of mine.”

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Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt season 1 (2015)

Started out very funny and got into a nice groove, without ever becoming less weird. Looking forward to more seasons.

I know Kimmy from the restaurant framing story of They Came Together. Roommate Tituss Burgess is from Queen of Jordan, landlady Carol Kane from Scrooged and Annie Hall, employer Jane Krakowski from 30 Rock and boyfriend Ki Hong Lee of The Maze Runner.

Appearances by Jerry Minor and series creator Tina Fey as shitty lawyers, Tim Blake Nelson as Kimmy’s stepdad and Jon Hamm as Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne. Surprisingly few 30 Rock writers on staff (I count three), plus Allison Silverman (Portlandia, Daily Show), Meredith Scardino (SNL, Colbert) and Emily Altman (Inside Amy Schumer).

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Inside Amy Schumer season 1 (2013)

Watched episodes right before and after seeing Trainwreck (making the film seem kinda tame in comparison). Outstandingly funny sketch show. Appearances by Michael Showalter, Michael Ian Black, Jon Glaser, show writer Tig Notaro, Amber Tamblyn, Rob Schneider, Dave Attell.

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NTSF:SD:SUV:: season 2 (2012)

Loud and ridiculous. Guests: Alan Tudyk, Kimmy Schmidt, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Hader, Ray Liotta, Aubrey Plaza, Rob and Aziz.

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Review season 1 (2014)

In which Forrest MacNeil (Andrew Daly of Delocated and The Informant!) gives star-ratings to life experiences as suggested by his viewing audience. The reviews destroy his life (sample questions: “what’s it like to get divorced?” and “what’s it like to run from the law?”) and tax his modest abilities (“what’s it like to be the life of the party?”). The show starts to get sour and depressing as Forrest sacrifices his well-being for the show, but you can’t take it too seriously, since he also sort of kills Fred Willard in space. With Megan Stevenson as his co-host, Jessica St. Clair as his (ex-)wife, James Urbaniak (American Splendor’s Crumb) as his producer, and appearances by Rich Fulcher and Lance Bass. Review highlights: road rage, orgy, pancakes, aching. Remake of an Australian show. Daly’s now in something called The Spoils Before Dying, which has an impressive cast.

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also rewatched The Mighty Boosh season 1 and season 2, which seems to get better with repeat viewing.