by ·Comments Off on The Most Dangerous Game (1932, Ernest Schoedsack)

Catching up on some early Criterion releases – this was filmmakers Schoedsack and Cooper and star Fay Wray’s precursor to King Kong. The Old Dark House, Island of Lost Souls, Vampyr and Freaks were also released in 1932, an amazing year for horror and horror-hybrids.

Leslie Banks (protagonist of The Man Who Knew Too Much) lords over a tiny jungle island where he hunts and kills people who shipwreck on his trap reef. Fellow hunter Joel McCrea (eight years before Foreign Correspondent, which was previously the earliest of his movies I’d seen) escapes a boat full of boring disaster-bait yachtsmen, and pals up with Fay Wray, while her doomed drunk brother (Robert Armstrong, the Jack Black of the original Kong) is killed offscreen. Banks, a great villain who might’ve seemed hammy had Armstrong’s drunk routine not far out-hammed him, chases the young couple with his bow, rifle, dogs, and mute guard played by Noble Johnson, a black actor in white-face. McCrea lays traps, which pro hunter Banks detects, and the good guys only win because of a lucky cliff fall.

The story by Richard Connell (who also cowrote Thrill of a Romance) has been filmed a million times, starring the likes of Sid Haig, Jane Greer and Richard Widmark. Good, short movie with some slick motion-camera shots.

by ·Comments Off on Mr. Vampire (1985, Ricky Lau)

Happy SHOCKtober! The ol’ blog is running months behind right now, and I’ve posting things out of order, but here’s a vampire flick to kick things off. More to come… eventually.

It’s something like this: rich guy asks mortuary master for help reburying his father. But father is a vampire, kills the rich guy and puts everyone else in danger. Master is arrested for the rich guy’s death and his two assistants try to save the day: attractive young Chor, haunted by a female ghost, and comic buffoon Man, bitten by a vampire and trying to keep from becoming one himself. At the end, no lessons are learned, but the movie is much fun, so it got sequels. Even Master stopped caring about the plot early on.

I spent most of the runtime piecing together Hong Kong’s rules about vampires. They hop, I knew that much from Seven Golden Vampires. You can freeze them and make them obey orders by taping yellow paper with a phrase written in chicken blood to their forehead. You create a barrier/trap or injure the vampire by snapping straight ink lines with a string. Sticky rice (only a certain kind!) draws out vampire poison from bitten people, and damages full vampires. They have long hard fingernails, and standard vampire teeth, but their bite marks come in threes. Fire and certain wooden swords can kill them. My favorite: if you hold your breath, vampires can’t find you.

L-R: Man (Ricky Hui), Master (Ching-Ying Lam), Chor (Siu-hou Chin, later in Fist of Legend)

There’s also a local government baddie, Wai, the nephew of the slain rich man, who is hot for his cousin Ting Ting, but Chor and Man keep making him look ridiculous (including a weird voodoo mind-control scene) so he’ll have no chance. I’m not sure whether the movie kills a baby goat and a chicken or if those are effects/editing, but I’m sure it kills a snake.

by ·Comments Off on The Hole (2000, Tsai Ming-Liang)

In Taiwan, the week leading up to January 2000, TV news reports that people are experiencing flu-like symptoms and then acting like cockroaches. But all we see is a strangely depopulated apartment building and market under constant rain. Drunken grocer (Kang-sheng Lee, star of every Tsai movie including Walker) upstairs has a nice place except for the hole the plumber has put in his floor leading to a woman downstairs (Kuei-Mei Yang, porn actress in The Wayward Cloud, schoolteacher in Eat Drink Man Woman) whose place is slowly flooding. So there’s a water shortage in The Wayward Cloud, plus a musical number set in a water tank of some sort – and now The Hole is the dampest movie I’ve ever seen.

Finally, I think he saves her from becoming a cockroach, pulling her upstairs through the hole. Is that what happens? Lot of long shots with slow tracking. Cool scene where he’s smoking on his landing while she’s on her own floor, pretending not to see each other, then a lipsync dance scene where she keeps chasing him while he escapes, all very Dennis Potter.

Acquarello:

Tsai’s oblique vision of a languishing, highly industrialized, and impersonal post “economic miracle” Taiwan recalls the bleak landscape and pervasive ennui of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films. The sound of incessant rain, extended silence, and viral quarantine create a sense of claustrophobia.

Part of the “2000 as Seen By” series. I’ve seen Hartley’s Book of Life and Sissako’s Life on Earth, not the ones by Miguel Albaladejo, Alain Berliner, Daniela Thomas and Walter Salles, Ildiko Enyedi or Laurent Cantet.

by ·Comments Off on The Act of Killing (2012, Joshua Oppenheimer)

What can you say? Sometimes the genocidal killers win, stay in charge, and have no reason to feel shame for what they’ve done. Someone finally got the great idea to interview these people and allow them to glorify/incriminate themselves. Letting them tell their own stories through filmmaking and showing the behind-the-scenes process was a stroke of genius, and filming it must’ve felt terrible and dangerous, as evidenced by all the anonymously-credited crew members.

Never go to Indonesia.

by ·Comments Off on Outrage Beyond (2012, Takeshi Kitano)

I thought everyone in Outrage had been killed except for one cop and new boss Kato, but here’s Takeshi still alive and I had to try to keep track of the various crime families again. This did turn out better than the original, but I’m still hoping Election and Drug War destroy ’em both.

People: Tomokazu Miura of M/Other is in charge of some clan, and young hotshot Ryo Kase of I Just Didn’t Do It and Like Someone In Love is his #2 man.

Takeshi and Kimura:

Takeshi teams up with scarfaced ex-rival Kimura with his two dumb-as-hell employees to wage war on these guys. Baddies are brought low by other baddies. Another clan is somehow involved. The Japanese Dr. Guggenheim (Akira Nakao, a regular in 1990’s Godzilla movies) is the first to die. Then lots more die. There is a brief appearance by a woman.

The Japanese Dr. Guggenheim:

We get two partner cops to identify with. Sourface Shigeta (Yutaka Matsushige of Last Life in the Universe) is the outsider who needs everything explained to him, and his sneaky balding corrupt partner (Fumiyo Kohinata of Dark Water) wants to start some shit and get the action going. Beat Takeshi shoots the balding guy at the end, after everyone else is already dead.

L-R: balding cop, sourface cop

A good variety of music, and the score has hints of Dead Man. Scenes end with fade-outs as if to provide space for TV ads. My main concern was listening to the language and noting that half of all sentences end with a sound like arrOH, or errOR. Fumi thinks it’s some kinda gangster embellishment.

by ·Comments Off on Frances Ha (2012, Noah Baumbach)

This was fun. I suppose I can forgive The Squid and the Whale now. Greta Gerwig (best known as the first victim in House of the Devil) wants to be a famous dancer, will never be a famous dancer, is kind of unsufferable but cute enough that you forgive her. A better movie than Monsters University about childhood dreams and hard work not entirely working out. Katy cringed a lot during the most Baumbachesque scene, an ultra-awkward dinner conversation, while I was busy trying to figure why Dean & Britta were in the scene.

by ·Comments Off on The Nun (1966, Jacques Rivette)

Revisiting this after watching so many Rivette movies. The sound design, amplifying ordinary noise from clothes, floors and chairs, usually uncovered by music, is the main familiar element. It may be his most tightly structured film, without any improv, though I’d have to watch it back-to-back with Don’t Touch the Axe to be sure.

“In marrying your sisters, we’ve ruined ourselves.” Anna Karina, towards the end of her Godard relationship, is sent to become a nun by her parents against her will in the mid-1700’s. To her, the experience is just like prison, but she manages to sneak out some letters and secures herself a lawyer (soundtrack plays ocean waves when she’s finally allowed to see him), incurring the wrath of head nun Francine Berge (gorgeous baddie of Franju’s Judex), until her punishment is finally noted by Berge’s superiors and Anna is moved to a new convent.

Karina and Berge have a nun-off:

The new one is a pleasure palace, run by clingy lesbian Liselotte Pulver (of A Time to Love and a Time to Die), whom the father confessor tells Anna to avoid like the devil. Anna doesn’t like this place any more than the last one, finally teams up with an amorous monk (Francisco Rabal, whose face was ripped off in Dagon) to escape. Best scene is with him, as she realizes his intentions and the music goes mental.

Karina and Pulver bond:

Anna flees him and he’s captured – oh, and her mom is dead, her friend who talked her into becoming a nun in the first place (Micheline Presle, Depardieu’s relative in I Want To Go Home) is dead, and now her lawyer is dead. Then she flees the village where she’s hiding out, gets picked off the street by a fancy lady, and finally flees her party right out an upper-story window. This made more sense once the internet told me the “fancy lady” was a prostitute, oops. C. Clouzot: “Rivette completes Diderot’s unfinished novel with her suicide.”

brief moment of happiness, post-escape:

the end is near:

Banned in France for over a year, with much public debate leading up to its eventual release. It’s funny now that this movie was considered so outrageous, falling five years after Mother Joan of the Angels and five before The Devils. Quite a good movie, even if not extremely Rivettian. Cinematographer Alain Levent worked on the first films by Chabrol, Rohmer and Truffaut, shot Cleo from 5 to 7, The Nun and later, Sam Fuller’s Day of Reckoning and Madonna and the Dragon. Adapted again (sort of) by Joe D’Amato in the 80’s and there’s a new version out with Isabelle Huppert.

by ·Comments Off on Monsters University (2013, Dan Scanlon)

I liked Helen Mirren’s dragon dean.

And the hissing vampire sorority, or whatever that was.

Sometimes hard work and following your dreams just isn’t enough.

The Blue Umbrella (2013, Saschka Unseld)

A remake of Paperman using photorealistic umbrellas with cartoon faces!

by ·Comments Off on A Lady Takes a Chance (1943, William Seiter)

Jean Arthur in her fourth-to-last movie. Her gentle, distinctively high voice floats above the constant hiss of background noise, barely audible but still clear as day.

She flees her three obnoxious suitors: pathetic, proper Grady Sutton (baddie of The Sun Shines Bright), unmemorable middleman Hans Conried and crude, punchy Grant Withers (a Clanton clansman in My Darling Clementine) for a Western bus tour, then loses the bus, ending up with handsome rodeo cowboy John Wayne (four years after Stagecoach but still not above crap like this).

Also, Charles Winninger, Judge Priest himself in The Sun Shines Bright (IMDB calls him “ever-huggable”) does his best Stumpy impression as Duke’s buddy Waco.

Seiter, eight years and 25 movies after Roberta, cranking ’em out too fast. Story writer Jo Swerling was oscar-nominated the previous year, would later cowrite Guys & Dolls on broadway. Produced by Jean Arthur’s husband, who cowrote her The More The Merrier the same year.

My favorite sentence from the TCM synopsis: “Joining Mollie in the hay, Duke warns her that he isn’t marriage material and speaks fondly of his horse, Sammy.”